Google goes off the climate change deep end

Chairman Eric Schmidt should heed his own advice – and base energy policies on facts

Guest essay by Paul Driessen and Chris Skates

In a recent interview with National Public Radio host Diane Rehm, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said his company “has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts. And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. We should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying.”

While he didn’t vilify us by name, Mr. Schmidt was certainly targeting us, the climate scientists who collect and summarize thousands of articles for the NIPCC’sClimate Change Reconsidered reports, the hundreds who participate in Heartland Institute climate conferences, and the 31,487 US scientists who have signed the Oregon Petition, attesting that there is no convincing scientific evidence that humans are causing catastrophic warming or climate disruption.

All of us are firm skeptics of claims that humans are causing catastrophic global warming and climate change. We are not climate change “deniers.” We know Earth’s climate and weather are constantly in flux, undergoing recurrent fluctuations that range from flood and drought cycles to periods of low or intense hurricane and tornado activity, to the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250 AD) and Little Ice Age (1350-1850) – and even to Pleistocene glaciers that repeatedly buried continents under a mile of ice.

What we deny is the notion that humans can prevent these fluctuations, by ending fossil fuel use and emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide, which plays only an insignificant role in climate change.

The real deniers are people who think our climate was and should remain static and unchanging, such as 1900-1970, supposedly – during which time Earth actually warmed and then cooled, endured the Dust Bowl, and experienced periods of devastating hurricanes and tornadoes.

The real deniers refuse to recognize that natural forces dictate weather and climate events. They deny that computer model predictions are completely at odds with real world events, that there has been no warming since 1995, and that several recent winters have been among the coldest in centuries in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, despite steadily rising CO2 levels. They refuse to acknowledge that, as of December 25, it’s been 3,347 days since a Category 3-5 hurricane hit the US mainland; this is by far the longest such stretch since record-keeping began in 1900, if not since the American Civil War.

Worst of all, they deny that their “solutions” hurt our children and grandchildren, by driving up energy prices, threatening electricity reliability, thwarting job creation, and limiting economic growth in poor nations to what can be sustained via expensive wind, solar, biofuel and geothermal energy. Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” From our perspective, perpetuating poverty, misery, disease and premature death in poor African and Asian countries – in the name or preventing climate change – is evil.

It is truly disturbing that Mr. Schmidt could make a statement so thoroughly flawed in its basic premise. He runs a multi-billion dollar company that uses vast quantities of electricity to disseminate information throughout the world. Perhaps he should speak out on issues he actually understands. Perhaps he would be willing to debate us or Roy Spencer, David Legates, Pat Michaels and other climate experts.

Setting aside the irrational loyalty of alarmists like Schmidt to a failed “dangerous manmade climate change” hypothesis, equally disturbing is the money wasted because of it. Consider an article written for the Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineers’ summit website by Google engineers Ross Koningstein and David Fork, who worked on Google’s “RE<C” renewable energy initiative.

Beginning in 2007, they say, “Google committed significant resources to tackle the world’s climate and energy problems. A few of these efforts proved very successful: Google deployed some of the most energy efficient data centers in the world, purchased large amounts of renewable energy, and offset what remained of its carbon footprint.”

It’s wonderful that Google improved the energy efficiency of its power-hungry data centers. But the project spent countless dollars and man hours. To what other actual benefits? To address precisely what climate and energy problems? And how exactly did Google offset its carbon footprint? By buying “carbon credits” from outfits like the New Forests Company, which drove impoverished Ugandan villagers out of their homes, set fire to their houses and burned a young boy to death?

What if, as skeptics like us posit and actual evidence reflects, man-made climate change is not in fact occurring? That would mean there is no threat to humans or our planet, and lowering Google’s CO2 footprint would bring no benefits. In fact, it would keep poor nations poverty stricken and deprived of modern technologies – and thus unable to adapt to climate change. Imagine what Google could have accomplished if its resources had been channeled to solving actual problems with actual solutions!

In 2011, the company decided its RE<C project would not meet its goals. Google shut it down. In their article, Koningstein and Fork admit that the real result of all of their costly research was to reach the following conclusion: “green energy is simply not economically, viable and resources that we as a society waste in trying to make it so would be better used to improve the efficiencies in established energy technologies like coal.”

Skeptics like us reached that conclusion long ago. It is the primary reason for our impassioned pleas that that the United States and other developed nations stop making energy policy decisions based on the flawed climate change hypothesis. However, the article’s most breathtaking statement was this:

“Climate scientistshave definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger….A 2008 paper by James Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies… showed the true gravity of the situation. In it, Hansen set out to determine what level of atmospheric CO2 society should aim for ‘if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.’ His climate models showed that exceeding 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects. We’ve already blown past that limit. Right now, environmental monitoring shows concentrations around 400 ppm.…”

We would never presume to question the sincerity, intellect, dedication or talent of these two authors. However, this statement presents a stunning failure in applying Aristotelian logic. Even a quick reading would make the following logical conclusions instantly obvious:

1. Hansen theorized that 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2 would have catastrophic results.

2. CO2 did indeed reach this level, and then exceeded it by a significant amount.

3. There were no consequences, much less catastrophic results, as our earlier points make clear.

This kind of reasoning (the scientific method) has served progress and civilization well since the Seventeenth Century. But the Google team has failed to apply it; instead it repeats the “slash fossil fuel use or Earth and humanity are doomed” tautology, without regard for logic or facts – while questioning CAGW skeptics intelligence, character and ethics. Such an approach would be disastrous in business.

We enthusiastically support Eric Schmidt’s admonition that our nation base its policy decisions on facts, even when those facts do not support an apocalyptic environmental worldview. We also support President Obama’s advice that people should not “engage in self-censorship,” because of bullying or “because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of someone whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.”

In fact, we will keep speaking out, regardless of what Messsrs. Schmidt, Hansen and Obama might say.

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Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: To save the world from the save-the-earth money machine. Chris Skates is an environmental chemist and author of Going Green: For some it has nothing to do with the environment.

391 thoughts on “Google goes off the climate change deep end”

“There were no consequences”
The increase in CO2 has helped plant growth and therefore, food production. There might not be any obvious deterimental consequences of increased CO2 (except in the heads of climate alarmists and “scientists”), but there beneficial consequences.

Perhaps what is needed is for this Google Exec to receive hundreds of thousands of letters requesting a listing of all Google Products and Services so that “We” can avoid utilizing them due to His stance on the subject

Either that or we might have to take its chairman’s advice and ban all this carbon producing IT for social domestic use and go back to the grandparent’s way of doing things, all for the sake of the grandkiddies of course. ‘Watt’ say you Mr Chairman?

Something similar happened a while ago with Pacific Bell. AT&T filed suit clainming that Pacific Bell was a monopoly. Pacific Bell was split into numerous “Baby Bells”. Now none of those Baby Bells seem to exist. AT&T purchaced them all.

In reply to Brian A,
In 1984, a consent decree took effect whereby the Bell System was broken into AT&T (Long Distance service, Bell Labs & Western Electric (equipment manufacture)) and 7 Bell Regional Operating Companies (RBOCs).
Pacific Telesis, one of the RBOCs, was the parent of Pacific Bell. Pacific Telesis was brought by Southwestern Bell (SWB), another RBOC. SWB also bought Ameritech, another RBOC, too. More recently, SWB bought AT&T and became the new AT&T. (Prior to the purchase, AT&T had spun off equipment manufacturing into Lucent Technologies which was bought by Alcatel after Lucent plunged into dire financial straits.)
Verizon may be the only RBOC not bought by some else. Only Verizon and Southwestern Bell now AT&T had managers smart enough to navigate the unregulated marketplace that the companies were introduced to in 1984.

Verizon was indeed one of the “smart ones”. They initially bought GTE which gave them a nationwide presence (replacing AT&T in that role). Then they bought MCI giving them the long distance lines. As such, while SWB was shrewd, Verizon became the new AT&T (sans the labs). And they are the biggest Cell carrier thanks to that.
Shrewd? Assuredly. But unfortunately, they suffer from the same thing AT&T sought to shed itself of with the divestiture. Government regulation. They are the biggest. But they are losing the battle to startups that do not have to answer to the government.

Google is obviously not a monopoly. I just did a google search for other search engins: Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ixquick, Ask.com, Blekko. Just because everyone enjoys googles speed and quality results, doesn’t mean they are a monopoly, or that they are engaging in predatorial practices ot eliminate competition.

Here is something else I find on the Google search engine. You are correct, they do not have a monopoly. They also don’t have a monopoly on information.
Is climate change just a thing of the past? We must act now?

Abstract – August 1974Climate modelingUnderstanding and predicting climate change have recently acquired a sense of urgency with the advent of serious climate-related food shortages and with the realization that human activities may have an influence on climate. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive theory of climate to explain its variability, nor are there physical models that can adequately simulate the climate system….http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/RG012i003p00447/full
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Paper – 18 December 1968
M. I. BUDYKO
The effect of solar radiation variations on the climate of the Earth
…Firstly we shall dwell upon the problem of climate change regularities during the last century. Fig. 1 represents the secular variation of annual temperature in the northern hemisphere that was calculated from the maps of temperature anomalies for each month for the period of 1881 to 1960 which were compiled at the Main Geophysical Observatory…
Tellus – Volume 21, Issue 5, pages 611–619, October 1969http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1969.tb00466.x/pdf
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Abstract – 1958
Langbein, W. B.; Schumm, S. A.
Yield of sediment in relation to mean annual precipitation
Effective mean annual precipitation is related to sediment yield from drainage basins throughout the climatic regions of the United States. Sediment yield is a maximum at about 10 to 14 inches of precipitation, decreasing sharply on both sides of this maximum in one case owing to a deficiency of runoff and in the other to increased density of vegetation. Data are presented illustrating the increase in bulk density of vegetation with increased annual precipitation and the relation of relative erosion to vegetative density. It is suggested that the effect of a climatic change on sediment yield depends not only upon direction of climate change, but also on the climate before the change. Sediment concentration in runoff is shown to increase with decreased annual precipitation, suggesting further that a decrease in precipitation will cause stream channel aggradation.
Transactions, American Geophysical Union, Volume 39, Issue 6, p. 1076-1084http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1958TrAGU..39.1076L
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Abstract – 1933Climatic Change as a Factor in Forest Succession
Journal of Forestry, Volume 31, Number 8, 1 December 1933, pp. 934-942(9)http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/saf/jof/1933/00000031/00000008/art00013
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Book – 1930
Mathematical climatology and astronomical theory of climate change
M Milankovich – Handbuch der Klimatologie, 1930http://tinyurl.com/ncxrwhn

I have many more urgency articles on climate change of the past and how we should have acted then.

November 7, 2014
Google abandons ALEC, but internal doc shows they find renewable energy “not feasible” for data centers, but good for image
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Isn’t that most likely what Chairman Schmidt is going on about? Making Google look good, regardless of the facts. Isn’t that the job of the Chairman?
In what way is he any different than an actor playing to an audience? Giving them what they want to hear. Google saving the world.
What do facts have to do with it? It would not surprise me at all to find out the message originated in the highest office in the land, and Chairman Schmidt is the messenger boy. There is a whole lot of legacy tied up in Climate Change. Never underestimate the power of Ego.

“Just because everyone enjoys googles speed and quality results, doesn’t mean they are a monopoly”
We should all remind ourselves that rankings in Google’s “quality results” are paid for. The executives at Google once promised, ever so sincerely, that the company would never alter its search rankings in exchange for cash compensation. Until they quietly began to do just that.

Sorry, Mike, but that’s not a monopoly. A monopoly is when there is a sole provider and they can pretty much do whatever they want to their captive audience. Google, as much as I despise them, are still a CHOICE. I develop for Chrome because it’s by far the best current browser (as before, that will change as soon as they become complacent and other, more hungry competitors take up the torch), but there is also IE and Firefox. I have an Android phone (because the alternative is Apple… ’nuff said).
For search I use Bing, except oddly enough when I’m searching for a phone number Bing is completely blind. Google finds them quickly.
I suspect this confusion between “monopoly” and “de facto standard” is why the left went after Microsoft in the 90s. Now they’re doing far worse.

Google IS a monopoly in some respects. And they are trying hard to hide it because they know what happened to MS. Link to a WSJ article. Go through DDG, and you get one faded paragraph. Through Google, you get the entire article. It is little wonder that Schmidt is sucking up to Obama on this as the decision to persecute a monopoly is purely political and subjective. Schmidt knows this so will bend with the political winds.

Definitely no monopoly when there’s free entry which there is. You may not like Google’s early adopter market share advantage as it has evolved, but clearly nearly 9 out of 10 users don’t share your view. Bear in mind they’re free to change providers anytime should Google become complacent and take they and competitors for granted.
Conservatives should be wary of criticizing success in the marketplace and best satisfying consumer demands.

Bing maps is also far superior to Google maps. Google maps has gone from fair to abominable in the past couple of years. Every time they ‘improve’ it, it gets worse. Too much ‘improvement’ all over the net.

in some ways google reminds me of the big box stores that move into your neighborhood. they use their economic clout to sell (give away) their products at less than cost (free), the loss being made up elsewhere in the business. this has the effect of driving the local competition into bankruptcy. once they have the market to themselves they are free to charge whatever they want.

google is not a monopoly.
I avoid it when I can because it IS evil. It censors information and polarizes people by making it hard to find opinions or facts that differ from one’s prejudices.
There are many other search engines. They also are evil, but they are better than google.

We also support President Obama’s advice that people should not “engage in self-censorship,” because of bullying or “because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of someone whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.”
This is good advice for commenting on climate change articles online. Needs moderation though.

“While he didn’t vilify us by name, Mr. Schmidt was certainly targeting us, the climate scientists who collect and summarize thousands of articles for the NIPCC’s Climate Change Reconsidered reports, the hundreds who participate in Heartland Institute climate conferences,”
Well, yes. The Heartland Institute is a disreputable think tank that was paid to lie about he harms of second hand smoke on behalf of tobacco companies in the 90s, just as it is paid to lie about climate change on behalf of the oil companies today. It is probably best known for comparing the majority of scientists who accept AGW to mass murderers. Your association with this group is nothing to brag about.
“and the 31,487 US scientists who have signed the Oregon Petition”
Would that be the same Oregon Petition that was filled with fake names from people like Spice Girl Geri Halliwell and Charles Darwin? The Oregon Petition that was intentionally made to resemble an official NAS document in order to fool people? The Oregon Petition in which less than 1% of signatories have a background in climate science? This is supposed to be impressive?
You know, the constant claims of “fraud” by this website would be a lot more convincing if your own participation in frauds weren’t so easily discovered.

As usual, Progressives assign one of their reliable propagandists to comment on any article in which the authors dares to disagree with them, slandering them and repeating lies.
There are no harms to secondhand smoke, so Heartland did not lie about them; nor did anybody pay Heartland to lie about anything. It is this Progressive propagandist who is lying.
As to the Oregon Project:

Would that be the same Oregon Petition that was filled with fake names…

No, that would be the same Oregon Petition that Progressive liars have been trying futilely for decades to slander, by falsely pointing out names they suppose are not real names. The Oregon Project has been scrupulous about policing the signatories. The figure of 30,000 signers is sound.
Global climate change is a political movement rather than a scientific one. We know this because climate change advocates employ the tactics of political hardball in their attempt bring the entire, free world under political domination, on the strength of false claims about the climate, and even worse false claims about those who point out the flaws in their research.

Phil Weingart: “There are no harms to secondhand smoke, so Heartland did not lie about them”
Wow. Somebody should tell the American Cancer Society, the CDC, the Mayo Clinic, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association…
Oh, but wait. They’re all part of the conspiracy, right? Picking on the poor little defenseless tobacco companies?
“by falsely pointing out names they suppose are not real names.”
Are you asserting that an actual Charles Darwin signed the Oregon Petition?
“The Oregon Project has been scrupulous about policing the signatories. The figure of 30,000 signers is sound.”
No, they haven’t, and no, it isn’t. You didn’t address that even of the 30,000 which includes obvious fake names (as well as many scientists who now claim they wish they had never signed), only less than a percent had a background in climate science, which makes the petition utterly meaningless.
Also, I never mentioned politics–you have no idea what my political leanings are, and I didn’t even state my position on climate change. I lean towards accepting the conclusions of the overwhelming majority of scientists and scientific bodies, since I am not a scientist, but if skeptics have compelling evidence to the contrary I am willing to accept it. But I am telling you, the arguments presented here are not very convincing to people not already on your side, especially if they bother to inform themselves. Even if scientists who accept AGW are involved in some kind of elaborate fraud, it’s very clear that the deniers are too.

Please can you provide some evidence for your counter claims of slander? I no longer use the petition as part of my argument against warmists as I don’t have any references to facts about it to refute the warmists claims.

Just FYI, the name the warmunists initially used to disparage the Oregon Petition was Michael J. Fox – who did, indeed, sign the Petition. But it’s not the “Back To The Future” actor. Just a guy with the same name, and – yes – he is a scientist.

Re second-hand smoke: There are two categories–chronic and episodic. Chronic SHS ingestion occurs to the spouse of a smoker. Episodic occurs to a visitor to a bar that allows smoking. The evidence of harm from episodic exposure is much weaker than that from chronic exposure.
Second, initially the evidence for harm from chronic exposure was weak, and it was not irresponsible to point that out. Later, the evidence firmed up. Those who initially were skeptical should not be portrayed as still being skeptical. (Assuming they no longer are. I don’t know what Heartland’s position is now.)

Are you asserting that an actual Charles Darwin signed the Oregon Petition?
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You logic is flawed. There are likely some bogus names in all petitions. That doesn’t make the valid names less valid.
There a a whole lot of Charles Darwin’s in the US. Some of them will be scientists. A quick check of the New York white pages turned up a bunch of “Charles Darwins”
What is not in dispute is that thousands of legitimated scientists have said that there is no convincing scientists evidence of CGW or CCG. Rather, that there is substantial scientific evidence that CO2 may be beneficial.

Was it the AGU that made a big public fuss about how the AGU firmly believes in AGW; yet it never ever polled its 50,000 or so members to find out what they actually do believe about that.
That’s 1 1/2 times as many fraudulent signers to the AGU’s publicly stated consensus.

Beside that, Chris, the whole consensus thing is about argument from authority, which is clearly invalid to the scientific method, or any line of higher thought. A freshman student of any specialty in science can filter what he hears with critical thought and discern honesty from propaganda, if he first disciplines his mind with the rules of scientific method, His relative knowledge level in that specialty is irrelevant because the rules don’t change by ‘department’. It is clear to the skeptic community that alarmists are ignoring these rules and expecting followers to take a ‘leap’ of faith. (e.g. God won’t manage this anymore. Our sin has doomed us to saving ourselves, whatever the cost to humanity.)

Chris;Would that be the same Oregon Petition that was filled with fake names from people like Spice Girl Geri Halliwell and Charles Darwin?
You can search the site for names yourself. I did just that and neither Halliwel nor Darwin come up, so your accusation is false.http://www.petitionproject.org/signers_by_last_name.php?run=HThe Oregon Petition that was intentionally made to resemble an official NAS document in order to fool people?
It was? You can see the statement card they were asked to sign right here:http://www.petitionproject.org/index.php
It looks nothing like a NAS document.The Oregon Petition in which less than 1% of signatories have a background in climate science?
LOL. Climate science is just a branch of physics. You can’t “define” them as not being climate scientists anymore than you can claim that, having learned to drive in a Honda Civic, you’re not qualified to drive a Mazda 6. I once asked Jan Perlwitz (well known “climate scientist”) to explain to me what about Keith Briffa’s most recent climate science paper could not be understood by someone with first year stats. He refused to answer the question.
Having thrown accusations at the petition which, with a few seconds of work, can be shown to be patently false, your snide attempt to dissuade readers that the expertise of the signatories is valid reads as similarly disingenuous, even if you know nothing about the science. (Which I should point out, a considerable number of us active in this forum do have significant expertise in.) Which leaves your last quip to be dealt with:You know, the constant claims of “fraud” by this website would be a lot more convincing if your own participation in frauds weren’t so easily discovered.
Speaking of easily discovered…. LOL.

It’s possible that the Oregon Petition has since removed the fake names, but their existence was very well documented. While some names may have been deleted, the fact that they were ever accepted in the first place casts doubt on the process by which the Petititon accepted signatories and verified their credentials. It seems that the Petititon counted anyone who claimed to be a scientist, with no verification of whether or not the signers even existed. So how can this petition be used as evidence that significant debate over climate change exists?
The NAS certainly believed that the petition looked enough like their documents to issue a statement distancing themselves from the petition:
“National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is concerned about the confusion caused by a petition…a manuscript in a format that is nearly identical to that of scientific articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”http://substantiagrisea.kinja.com/the-oregon-petition-this-is-a-joke-right-1578762955
Your claim that it is irrelevant that less than one percent of the signatories claim to have a climatology background is absurd, and does not even merit a response. When only 39 of the 30,000 signatories has a background in climate science, that matters. Of course that matters.
The Oregon Petition does not show any evidence of a debate among climate scientists over the existence or nature of anthropogenic global warming; no one even remotely familiar with statistics could honestly argue otherwise.
Once again: if you really want to undermine the AGW theory, you need to develop better arguments. It is very hard to convince people that AGW is simply a scam or a hoax when your side is creating their own scams and hoaxes to further their own agenda.

ANd once again chris offers no evidence of his opinion, just non sequiturs, ad hominems and straw men. Notice how he keeps moving the goal posts as each of his lies are debunked. Now he wants everyone to prove a negative. Perhaps that is what all alarmists are – religious zealots that have no clue about science.

Chris;Your claim that it is irrelevant that less than one percent of the signatories claim to have a climatology background is absurd, and does not even merit a response. When only 39 of the 30,000 signatories has a background in climate science, that matters. Of course that matters.
Ah, you’re not a hit and run troll, you’re of the “persistent” variety.
Well Chris, almost none of the big names in climate science began as anything but the exact same kinds of scientists as the ones in this petition. If you apply that criteria to the debate, then Hanson and Mann and Briffa and many others from your side of the fence will have to be booted from the debate also.It’s possible that the Oregon Petition has since removed the fake names, but their existence was very well documented.
You claimed the petition has those names, I demonstrated that you were wrong. So you now fall back and, well, they used to be there. OK, I’ll take your word for that, from which I draw the following conclusion: One or more people from your side of the fence were so concerned about the credibility of the petition that, rather than mount an opposing petition of their own with a similar number of scientists, they chose instead to plant false names in the petition in an effort to discredit it. The planting of false names for this purpose speaks poorly of your side of the fence, not ours. If you could discredit the poll by legitimate means, I expect your would have done so. Instead you complain that chemists and physicists and engineers and biologists are not “real” climatologists while ignoring the fact that “real” climatologists are, in fact, chemists and physicists and biologists and engineers. And, instead of raising a comparable petition of your own, you seek to sabotage ours. You can’t play the game on even terms, do you resort to under handed tactics.It is very hard to convince people that AGW is simply a scam or a hoax when your side is creating their own scams and hoaxes to further their own agenda.
There’s plenty of people who scream scam or hoax at the drop of a hat in the forum. You’ll find if you follow it though, that the majority of us who have background in the science do no such thing, and in fact suffer the slings and arrows from our own side when we correct some of the bad science that gets presented here. But at days end, AGW is not a scam, it is real. The question is what is the magnitude of the effects, and what are the costs of mitigation versus adaptation. I have seen no compelling evidence to suggest that the magnitude is high, nor that adaptation would cost more than mitigation, in fact the opposite for both.
The fact of the matter also is that the last report from the IPCC, AR5, admitted that the computer models which earlier reports had relied on were running much hotter than reality and should be discounted accordingly. As to the range of sensitivity, the AR5 report could NOT arrive at a consensus value as previous reports had, and instead just increased the lower end of the range, then proclaimed their certainty to be even greater than before. I don’t know how one gets from AR4’s range of 2.0 to 4.5 degrees with a consensus estimate of 3.0, to AR5’s range of 1.5 to 4.5 and no consensus estimate at all as a “higher degree of certainty”. Sounds to me like a greater level uncertainty dressed up in the language of a spin doctor.
The truth is that the IPCC admitted that the models are running hot, and there are now over 50 peer reviewed papers trying to explain the discrepancy, and these are frequently in disagreement with one another. So, while you wail and curse the splinter in our eye, you quietly ignore the beam in yours.

David, please read more carefully before you accuse me of lying.
My exact words were this:
“Would that be the same Oregon Petition that was filled with fake names from people like Spice Girl Geri Halliwell and Charles Darwin?”
Note the word “was.” I never claimed that the names were still there. But the fact that they were ever there shows the weakness of the verification process of the petition (ie, there was none). Yes, the names were submitted mostly by AGW believers, but I think this was a perfectly valid way of demonstrating the weakness of the petition.
The fact remains that the group behind the petition has not revealed their methodology for verifying that the remaining names belong to real scientists. The fact remains that the guy who spearheaded this petition is a creationist nut job who has admitted he won’t accept any science that could contradict either Testament of the Bible. And the fact remains that touting his petition in the first place amounts to hypocrisy from the skeptics, since they are the first to say that the number of scientists supporting a theory has nothing to do with whether or not the theory is true.

“You can search the site for names yourself. I did just that and neither Halliwel nor Darwin come up, so your accusation is false.”
Luckily they are able to scrub the fake names faster than Chris is able to submit them.

Jimbo December 26, 2014 at 11:38 pm
Chris,
I don’t lie about climate change. I am not paid to even attempt it.
But you did lie. You complained names were in the petition that weren’t. You admitted that. Now, as to being paid to lie, that’s a n interesting comment. Which raises the question, what ARE you payed to do? Because no one would normally talk about what they get paid to do in the context of a forum like this unless… they were being paid to do it.

sigh
I read your comment fo Chris as being from Chris. I hate this nested forum thing, it just makes who you are conversing with about what that much harder to follow. Especially after too much good food and too much wine.

Hold on! Are you saying that the leading climate scientist are not PhD’s in Climate Science? That the lead authors for the IPCC are not PhD’s in Climate Science?
No wonder the models have gone off the rails and climate science cannot explain the Pause aka Hiatus aka Plateau. They have no more qualifications to be climate scientists than your average car mechanic, shoe salesman or politician.

Chris, consider this. I hate smoking but how certain are you about second hand smoke? Here is a timely lesson about jumping on bandwagons and consensus. This is why sceptics exist, to keep us out of witchcraft and Climastrology.

Guardian – 23 March 2014Why almost everything you’ve been told about unhealthy foods is wrong
Eggs and red meat have both been on the nutritional hit list – but after a major study last week dismissed a link between fats and heart disease, is it time for a complete rethink?
………
Last week it fell to a floundering professor, Jeremy Pearson, from the British Heart Foundation to explain why it still adheres to the nutrition establishment’s anti-saturated fat doctrine when evidence is stacking up to refute it. After examining 72 academic studies involving more than 600,000 participants, the study, funded by the foundation, found that saturated fat consumption was not associated with coronary disease risk. This assessment echoed a review in 2010 that concluded “there is no convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease”……http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/mar/23/everything-you-know-about-unhealthy-foods-is-wrong
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Butter and cheese better than trans-fat margarines, says heart specialist
Aseem Malhotra says saturated fat is not a problem, low-fat products are often full of sugar and statins are over-prescribed
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Butter, cheese and even red meat are not as bad for the heart as has been maintained, a cardiologist has said in a leading medical journal, adding that it is time to “bust the myth” of saturated fat.
…..Trans-fats found in many fast foods, bakery goods and margarine are indeed a problem, Malhotra writes in the British Medical Journal. But saturated fats in milk, cheese and meat are another matter.http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/oct/22/butter-cheese-saturated-fat-heart-specialist
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BBC – 14 October 2014
Should people be eating more fat?
…..Scientists from Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard, amongst others, examined the links between eating saturated fat and heart disease. Despite looking at the results of nearly 80 studies involving more than a half million people they were unable to find convincing evidence that eating saturated fats leads to greater risk of heart disease.
In fact, when they looked at blood results, they found that higher levels of some saturated fats, in particular a type of saturated fat you get in milk and dairy products called margaric acid, were associated with a lower risk of heart disease……
A recent study, this time published in the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care, “High dairy fat intake related to less central obesity“, certainly questioned the link.
In this study, researchers followed 1,589 Swedish men for 12 years. They found that those following a low-fat diet (no butter, low-fat milk and no cream) were more likely to develop fat around the gut (central obesity) than those eating butter, high-fat milk and whipping cream.http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29616418

Wall Street Journal – 2 May, 2014
The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease
Are butter, cheese and steak really bad for you? The dubious science behind the anti-fat crusade“Saturated fat does not cause heart disease”—or so concluded a big study published in March in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. How could this be? The very cornerstone of dietary advice for generations has been that the saturated fats in butter, cheese and red meat should be avoided because they clog our arteries……..Our distrust of saturated fat can be traced back to the 1950s, to a man named Ancel Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Keys was formidably persuasive and, through sheer force of will, rose to the top of the nutrition world—even gracing the cover of Time magazine—for relentlessly championing the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a result, cause heart attacks.
This idea fell on receptive ears because, at the time, Americans faced a fast-growing epidemic. Heart disease, a rarity only three decades earlier, had quickly become the nation’s No. 1 killer. Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955. Researchers were desperate for answers……
Critics have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms in his study…..http://tinyurl.com/m8sczes

Annals of Internal Medicine – 18 March, 2014
Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury et al
Association of Dietary, Circulating, and Supplement Fatty Acids With Coronary Risk: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
Conclusion: Current evidence does not clearly support cardiovascular guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats.
Primary Funding Source: British Heart Foundation, Medical Research Council, Cambridge National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre, and Gates Cambridge.http://tinyurl.com/q3hqfvc

nutrition history is full of faulty science. artificial food was introduced without adequate testing and an epidemic of heart disease followed. low fat diets were introduced without adequate study and an epidemic of obesity and diabetes followed. all with the blessing of the government.
millions of people were harmed and killed by this failure of science. The scientists of the day were equally convinced they were right as climate science is today. They rushed to cut off debate and implement a solution, without considering the contrary evidence. Industry was only too happy to benefit from the new rules.
Are we now going to rush to do the same in the name of climate science?

I’m also puzzled as to why posters also genuinely believe that the heartland institute is a non political and objective body who present only the facts without any influence or political goals in mind. After many years of reading and posting on this site and others a couple of things have become clear. As soon as someone mentions Obama or silly terms like “warmunist” or “denier” you can pretty well dismiss the rest of their posting as nonsense based on politics not science. I have also learned that when someone makes a prediction that something will happen within a certain time frame they are invariably wrong. And when they claim certain knowledge that something is incorrect, they are also closing their minds to learning. Posters may feel that having the vast majority of the scientific community agree on something like smoking or climate science means nothing, but they have to ask themselves whether they would continue to believe such an unlikely scenarion if it were their point of view the world of science agreed with.

if it were their point of view the world of science agreed with.
=============
scientists are impressed by how many people agree with them. facts could care less. thus one cannot trust in the opinion of the majority. it may be responding to popularity over truth.

Of course Heartland is biased, as are all “Think Tanks”, Left or Right.
What is even more disturbing is when taxpayer funded Climate Scientists like Jones, Hansen, Mann, Schmidt, etc. behave in ways that are even more biased. This is incredibly reprehensible to people like me that once respected Science and the Scientific Method.
Climate Science is a nascent science and poorly understood at this point. Any reasonable, intelligent person would agree, do you?

showing that second hand smoke is harmful
==================
those are not the important papers. the important papers are the ones showing an absence of harm.
this is where modern science has led people astray. it is why nutrition science has proven so wrong. if you look long enough you can prove anything causes anything. but all you have really found is co-incidence. on occasion, when you throw a virgin into the volcano that volcano will go quiet soon afterwards. from this we will conclude that it doesn’t pay to be a virgin.
what you are really interested in is how many times throwing a virgin into the volcano did not stop the volcano. this is the important number. the negative example is what separates science from superstition.

“and the 31,487 US scientists who have signed the Oregon Petition”
The Oregon Petition in which less than 1% of signatories have a background in climate science? This is supposed to be impressive?

Yes, if your claim is true, it is. Because in this case some 300 US climate scientists have actually signed the Oregon Petition. And those who have done so are obviously outside the consensus, which is supposed to include more than 97% of climate scientists.
What follows is that there are more than 10,000 climate scientists in the US alone, with a total annual salary of a billion dollars or so + untold amount of grant money, an impressive result indeed.
BTW, when evaluating fields of inquiry like Homeopathy, Phrenology or Astrology, the last persons whose opinion should be taken into account are those having a firm background in said fields, is that not so?

Ron,
In English, the word “was” indicates the past tense. I never made any claims about whether those names are still there currently. The group behind the petition acknowledged that those and other fake names did appear, and have since scrubbed them. You can easily discover this yourself with a quick Google–er, Bing– search. They claim to now have a verification process in place, but since they haven’t revealed what that process entails, there is no way to know for sure.
I accept your apology in advance.

They claim to now have a verification process in place, but since they haven’t revealed what that process entails, there is no way to know for sure.
===========
in point of fact, you have proven they have just such a process. Since they removed the bogus names that you claim were there previously, they must have just such a process in place. Otherwise the names would still be there.
the reason for not revealing the process is obvious. so bogus signatories could not use this information to find a weakness in the process and thus evade detection.
it is much harder to circumvent security when you don’t have inside information. thus companies do not make their security procedures public, even to their staff.

“in point of fact, you have proven they have just such a process. Since they removed the bogus names that you claim were there previously, they must have just such a process in place. Otherwise the names would still be there.”
That’s just silly. Obviously there are some fake names that are going to be very easy to spot–“I.C. Eew” was pretty likely not a real person, and so was removed. But what of the more feasible names that were submitted? Are they checking those? They claim to be, but given the shady backgrounds of the people involved–seriously, look at Arthur Robinson’s history and statements–I have no idea why we should take them seriously without proof.
“the reason for not revealing the process is obvious. so bogus signatories could not use this information to find a weakness in the process and thus evade detection.”
Again, silly. If there are good measures in place to verify the identities of the signatories, the costs of revealing those measures would be less than the benefits; the petition would be taken more seriously, and while some fake names might still get through, the public would have less reason to be suspicious. As it stands, we know it was ridiculously easy for people to submit fake names in the beginning, some of those names were purged, and maybe the signatories are better identified now. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence–expect, of course, for people who really, really want to believe that the petition is reliable.

Chris continues to plead “..was” about these sigs…. that and most of his other statements put him clearly aligned with the “Take My Word For It Science” of the global warming dooms-sayers and Al Gore cronies. The ones who make their living by ignoring reality.

Totally agree with you. Basically the Heartland Institute is a bunch of white guys that are paid to believe that the Earth is flat and that the biological inheritance of this planet is entirely a resource to be abused. It’s the romantic hyper-industrial redefined sense of self that starts with humans (and mainly rich ones) and ends with them. The basic premise is biodiversity, ethnodiversity, ecological integrity – what’s that? You guys know what I’m talking about.
Hmmmm, but maybe you don’t. Because we have so desecrated (read: made not sacred) the world at this point that our psyches are thoroughly colonized by human-centric notions. We have largely forgotten what it means to be a human in relationship with the more-than-human world. But, to folks of the so called “Heartland” these thoughts are all gobbledygook because they and most of us (including me) have largely lost the capacity to understand how this restricted form of selfhood – which is so nicely exemplified by the Heartland Institute – is killing our world. A comprised and profoundly restricted sense of self complements an immensely impoverish landscape as well as a vastly compromised biological world.
OK, you say you don’t know what I’m talking about. Perhaps you are not supposed to. Our psyche and capacity to experience certain felt human emotions and connections to the world, other than ourselves, has been nearly completely overridden and nearly totally assimilated and colonized by the world order of these “Heartland” thoughts that are so disembodied from this planet and what we are doing to it
It is uncomfortably close to the attitude of those Austrian villagers who lived near to, but refused to acknowledge the presence of, extermination camps such as Mauthausen during the Holocaust, despite the smell of burning flesh and the occasional wisps of human hair that floated on the wind. As one woman put it, ‘I am happy when I hear nothing and see nothing of it. As far as I am concerned, they aren’t interned. That’s it. Over. It does not interest me at all’. While such attitudes may permit one a degree of psychological comfort, they do so at the price of a deeper and more dangerous alienation from reality. Good luck to us all…

Dave C
Totally agree with you. Basically the Heartland Institute is a bunch of white guys that are paid to believe that the Earth is flat and that the biological inheritance of this planet is entirely a resource to be abused. It’s the romantic hyper-industrial redefined sense of self that starts with humans (and mainly rich ones) and ends with them. The basic premise is biodiversity, ethnodiversity, ecological integrity – what’s that? You guys know what I’m talking about.

Gee. You start with a flat-lie, then “defend it” by claiming that the Heartland institute promotes those lies because they are rich white guys. Then you continue into the Nazi-metaphor of denial.
So. Between you and Chris, exactly what evidence and logic do you follow in your religious devotion to your CAGW religion to justify 85 years of increased harm to billions, and the direct death of millions by denying the poor energy and improvements? And .. for what gain? Increased CO2 creates NO PENALTIES and causes no harm. Increased global average temperatures between 0 and 4 degrees cause no harm.

One of the most ignorant, racist comments I have ever read on this site. You stereotype those you nothing about and then decry your stereotypes of them.
You are a sad, pathetic individual. Get help for your hatred. It seems to consume you.

Chris, for heavens sake, just look at the facts and tell us in what way you feel that AGW is proven. We sceptics just look at the facts as presented by nature itself. We don’t look at computer programmes which are always proven to be wrong, and we don’t manipulate the empirical scientific record to produce the results to suit our case. Just relax and give us your explanation why there has been no warming in 18 years. Why the Arctic ice has not disappeared as those who you believe in forecast. Tell us why the Polar Bear population is growing or the seas not rising, and why last year the world had record food output. Until you give us answers to these questions and many more, then I don’t think you will find many realists listening to your critical comments on the huge numbers of scientists and non scientists who are looking for empirical evidence before they commit to believing that the world is coming to an end, due to things like a few power stations being dotted around the earth, pushing out a relatively small amount of CO2 in order to make the world a better place to live in.
And as for those few fake names the believers found in the Oregon Petition, It would be easy for the believers to submit names to disrupt the integrity of the petition, but that still leaves very many thousands that were genuine.

“Chris, for heavens sake, just look at the facts and tell us in what way you feel that AGW is proven.”
I never once argued that AGW is proven.
I simply took issue with the specific appeals to authority in this article. The authors appealed to both the Heartland Institute and the Oregon Petition to argue that there is considerable debate among scientists over the existence and nature of AGW. I was trying to show that neither of these are credible sources for such a claim, and I think I did that.
I am not interested in a larger debate over AGW.

You have to remember that in my opinion your psyche, thoughts and sense of felt body have been colonized by a worldview that is really not your own. In my mind you are just saying these things and finding all kinds of discrepancies because you, me, and everyone who is writing and responding and all of us who have been confined within this hyper-industrialized “borg-like” culture are suffering from a chronic form of disconnect from who we are as human beings and how we relate to the more-than-human world. We’ve been colonized by a particular worldview that allows us to see the world in a particular way and only by becoming blind to other equally valid worldviews that may be far more healthful for ourselves, our society and the greater world.
So, it makes sense that you are scared and I also bet that some parts of you are actually in deep despair about what we are doing to the world and the impoverished future we are leaving for our children. It’s OK to acknowledge despair. I acknowledge my own. What often happens however is that we drown our despair out with psychopharmaceuticals, illicit drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, computer games, mindless entertainment, fossil fuels (probably the most potent drug around), and an endless array of addictions of all sorts. And in doing so, we don’t realize that our culture has stripped away so much of the ancient human wisdom might help us to feel whole and connected so that we can have clear thoughts and engage in mindful discussions and decisions.
Things really get scary, however, when we don’t know how to deal with our despair and we begin to protect and justify a painful and absurd culture that has redefined us into “consumers.” If you notice, I don’t really talk about climate change (although I’m pretty sure that’s happening), carbon footprints, or anything of that sort. If you are a serious student of the world and our culture, there’s are lots of books and resources I can recommend. One really great video series is The Century of the Self and you can see it at

I highly recommend it.
I have never participated or responded to these sorts of conversations until now. I try to really limit my computer usage and balance it all out with work in the real world. I just spent the larger part of the day in beautiful state park. As Nietzsche once remarked “sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement — in which the muscles do not also revel.”

Dave C
And in doing so, we don’t realize that our culture has stripped away so much of the ancient human wisdom might help us to feel whole and connected so that we can have clear thoughts and engage in mindful discussions and decisions.

Funny that. The “ancient human wisdom” knew almost nothing, lived for 294,000 years in caves, plains, savannahs and grassland, dying of starvation, hunger, disease, malnutrition, accidents, animal predation, human warfare, and parasites and illnesses at age averaging under 25 – with most killed in childbirth and as a child.
Yet the ONE THING that enabled people to live, to thrive, and to improve (energy from fossil fuels and benefits from that energy) you curse. Do you really like people dead? Do you really believe -after your mind-numbed government-paid collegiate propaganda – that we are worse off now that ever before in history/ Just what have you studied? What do you know? I see only gibberish and hatred,, a love for a an abstract life in the plains of Africa with you dead at age 21 from infestation, starvation, and blood poisoning.

@Chris,
Heartland is a well respected organization that gets most of its income from small donations. That alone makes it different from your Soros-paid blogs, where you find your misinformation. Heartland is only ‘disreputable’ in your own screwed up world view.
The tobacco canard is built on the Big Lie, so of course it won’t go away. But people who actually think, know that demonizing “tobacco” is effective propaganda. What I don’t understand is why someone like you would buy into the tarring of a conservative organization that promotes following the Constitution. Maybe you don’t like that.
Next, you posted two names, but those names are not co-signers of the OISM Petition. Why would you fabricate something like that? Please explain why you would invent something that is so very easy to verify: http://www.oism.org/pproject
Even if it were true [it isn’t], two names out of 31,000 is pretty lame. Is the at the best you can do? Compare your two invented names with all the names Cook threw out, in order to get his bogus “97%”. Should we ignore that, just because it is your own ox being Gored?
Your talking points are old and busted, Chris. Trot on back to your favorite alarmist blog, you need some new things to parrot.

dbstealey: “What I don’t understand is why someone like you would buy into the tarring of a conservative organization that promotes following the Constitution. Maybe you don’t like that.”
The Constitution has nothing to do with science. The Heartland Institute misleads on scientific issues and public health issues. The fact that it believes it is doing so in order to preserve the Constitution is immaterial, and does not justify their lies or their incredibly gross tactics such as comparing their opponents to mass murderers.
“Next, you posted two names, but those names are not co-signers of the OISM Petition. Why would you fabricate something like that? Please explain why you would invent something that is so very easy to verify: http://www.oism.org/pproject”
As I have pointed out many times, I never said those names are still on the petition, I said that the petition “WAS” filled with fake names such as the two mentioned, and numerous sources have confirmed that those names were at one time on the petition. The group behind the petition acknowledged that fake names were submitted to the petition and claimed to have deleted them, so I’m not sure why you keep insisting that I “fabricated” anything; you can’t keep linking to the petititon itself to disprove my claim, because again, those names are not there anymore. But you could easily Google (or Bing, since now you want to punish Google for having an opinion you disagree with) my claims and find that they are 100% accurate.
“Even if it were true [it isn’t], two names out of 31,000 is pretty lame. Is the at the best you can do? Compare your two invented names with all the names Cook threw out, in order to get his bogus “97%”. Should we ignore that, just because it is your own ox being Gored?”
It wasn’t just two out of 31,000 names, but the point stands that we have no way of knowing whether the majority of those who signed are real scientists. A petition simply isn’t a good barometer of how many in the scientific community agree or disagree with the theory of AGW; a scientific survey is a much better method of determining that. Cook didn’t invent any fake names, so I don’t understand your comparison. Furthermore, at least three other studies backed up Cook’s conclusions, and a Pew poll showed about 87% of scientists agree with the theory of AGW.
Now, I agree that whether or not a “consensus” exists doesn’t prove whether AGW is true, but then…what is the point of bringing up the 31,000 number? Climate skeptics can’t say one moment that the number of scientists agreeing with AGW doesn’t matter and then in the next breath say “Look at all these scientists who disagree! See, this is evidence that AGW isn’t real!” The two arguments are completely contradictory, and making both of them is hypocritical.

[quote]Chris: (about Heartland Institute and dbstealey’s comment regarding the HI promoting constitutional adherence)
The Constitution has nothing to do with science. The Heartland Institute misleads on scientific issues and public health issues.[/quote]
…again, more proof of his, (and the hater Dave C) “Jump on the bandwagon” “Take my word for it” and “psuedoscience” of Al Gore, Obama, and their cronies, who make statements and claims regardless of fact.
Facts:
[quote]The Heartland Institute works with free market-oriented experts to discuss the good and bad of national, state and local government policies in the tax and spending arenas. Topics include income, sales and excise taxes, economic development, targeted tax incentives, government pension and health costs, and other influences on taxes and spending[/quote]
[quote]The Heartland Institute’s Education Issue Suite not only aggregates decades of the latest school reform news and research, but reaches behind the scenes to bring you experts analyzing which of these expanding options actually do expand the options for students and their families. No other think tank or publication instigates and investigates education reform this way. Browse by daily for the best and latest in student-centered educa[/quote]
[quote]Heartland’s Center on Finance Insurance and Real Estate (C-FIRE) focuses on free-market, pro-consumer regulation of financial markets. We favor policies that empower individuals, replace centralized government authority, and pare regulations.[/quote]
[quote]Consumers for Health Care Choices, a project of The Heartland Institute, seeks to preserve individual freedom, improve the quality of health care, and improve the efficiency of America’s health care system[/quote]
[quote]Legal research and sometimes participation in litigation are among the tools The Heartland Institute uses to advance its mission of discovering, developing, and promoting free-market solutions to social and economic problems.
Heartland files amicus briefs in cases where important principles of freedom are at stake.[/quote]
[quote]The Center on the Digital Economy at The Heartland Institute works to advance this simple notion: The Internet is not “broken,” and government attempts to “fix it” will retard the enormous potential for economic growth fueled by advances in telecommunications and technology.
Heartland believes that rules for the Internet and electronic commerce should result from private collective action, not government regulation. [/quote]
Nothing to do with the constitution??
If what they’re doing is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right!!

.Chris
.
” and does not justify their lies or their incredibly gross tactics such as comparing their opponents to mass murderers”
Once again, like all believers, you brand opposing viewpoints as lies, rather than state why you think they are lies. Additionally, which side of the scientific argument do you believe brands all sceptics as ‘deniers’?
You also write, quote – “I am not interested in a larger debate over AGW “, On the contrary, you have entered very much into the debate on AGW, so please don’t make your many questionable statements without answering your critics with some supporting facts .Open your mind and ask yourself why almost all forecasts by the AGW scientists, who you clearly support, have come to nothing. Believers can change their minds you know as so many have already done so.. .

“Don’t be evil” wasn’t working for them because exploiting all of mankind by data mining is inherently evil. It should now read as “Be evil because it’s really really profitable but try not to look stupid doing it like that Al Gore idiot”.

Very well put, and accurate.
Google has signed on to the Big Government Intrusive Monitoring big time. Anything that flows through Google, you can pretty much assume has a feed to the NSA. Once you sign on to being “Lackey To Government” in the core of your business, you can expect more such “influence” to be around.
Furthermore, in Silicon Valley, a whole lot depends on ‘who you know’ and having the correct trendy thoughts and reputation. Anyone who didn’t ‘toe the line’ would find low venture capital available, few ‘tips’ about what company to buy, and more. Yes, you can still “make it”, but with much more difficulty. That Apple suddenly started being an OK alternative in companies right after Steve Jobs left and they signed onto the same NSA monitoring-built-in program is, IMHO, no accident.
In fact, you can pretty much graph the growth of functional monopolies based on who signed up for Government Snuggle and when. And the “outcasts” often “recover” just after they agree to sign up…
Is that all there is? No, not at all. It’s not 100% and it has holes in it. But it doesn’t need to be 100%. I’ve been at a lot of S.Valley companies when they were buying others, or being bought. Sometimes a company will just buy up some junk companies cheep to gain news coverage so their IPO looks more juicy ( I was at one of those… the stuff they bought was kind of silly, really). But sometimes that is done so that a potential competitor with a moral compass gets closed down. Make the competition simpler…
It was, in some ways, that kind of action and the frustration that comes from it that lead to the Free Software movement; and why I tend to use Linux and “roll my own” for things like workstations and routers.
Google was somewhat privileged in that they had a functional monopoly on search and a large chunk of other data (you must be gigantic to store the amount they store) and it is not something where you can ‘roll your own’; so they got a visit from the nice men in grey suits… and now they have embraced a business model that sucks even MORE data into their hands. Chrome.
I bought a Chromebox as a quick “browser appliance” and so that I could look into the security aspects of it. It is fairly secure from outsider attack, BUT, is highly biased toward sending your data in ways and to places that let it be captured by insiders; like Google and the NSA. (I’ll eventually put Linux on it…) Simply put, anytime you try to keep data private and ‘on the box’, you find it fights you and tries to send it to ‘the cloud’ and ‘the web’ where there’s nice little pipes to ‘other folks’ built in (even inside the encrypted pipes as they have built in ‘man in the middle’ in things like SSL – or so I’ve seen asserted in the leaked docs). And what do we find is “approved” at all sorts of companies? Oh, Chrome…
Now I was a Director of I.T. and responsible for a lot of security protection. I used to wonder why folks approved equipment with ‘holes’ in it like that.. approved that kind of product with obvious exposures built in (Microsoft is stuffed with them). I don’t wonder anymore. The leaks made it pretty clear there was an “approved” list and if you wanted to get those big government contracts, you agreed to support and use the approved stuff…
Now I’ve worked with a bunch of the folks from Google (who came from companies where I was working) and many of them are very security conscious. That shows in things like the basic security against outside attack built into Chrome OS and the generally reliable workings. But it only takes a few folks at the upper management levels to make sure the Man In The Middle attack will work when THEY are the ones in the middle.
So my interpretation of their motto would be:
“Don’t be obviously evil enough for folks to catch on, just enough to make a lot of money.”

“Hansen theorized that 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2 would have catastrophic results.”
Really? I’d love a reference for this if it’s actually so. Anybody know where I can dig this up?
Yes, these ‘tipping points’ never seem to have any actual scientific evidence backing them up, they’re just purely arbitrary claims.

‘ The largest uncertainty in the target arises from possible changes of non-CO2 forcings. An initial 350 ppm CO2 target may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2 is captured and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.’ Hansen et al 2008http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha00410c.html

Found it here. He didn’t say exceeding 350 ppm would be catastrophic. He said, in 2008, that it was a good number to aim to get back to. He said:“If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”
If not, we’ll get something else.

Nick Stokes
Found it here. He didn’t say exceeding 350 ppm would be catastrophic. He said, in 2008, that it was a good number to aim to get back to….

Here is something else he said from the paper you linked to.

An initial 350 ppm CO2 target may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2 is captured and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf

Why did you say that “He didn’t say exceeding 350 ppm would be catastrophic”? As you can see he did.

Nick,
Out of interest Hansen used the word catastrophic two further times in the paper you linked to. The man is unhinged.

Hansen et al
Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?
…..An initial 350 ppm CO2 target may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2 is captured and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects……
A reward system for improved agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon could remove the current CO2 overshoot. With simultaneous policies to reduce non-CO2 greenhouse gases, it appears still feasible to avert catastrophic climate change.
Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision-makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the era beyond fossil fuels. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf

Whenever is see people declaring that climate change is occurring I immediately wonder if they are so stupid to think this is new.
In the very least can we get people to describe their argument properly, as in:
1) people are the primary driver of climate change
2) this change is demonstrably bad
3) the cost of mitigating the change is less than the cost of that change

1) people are the primary driver of climate change
False….. solar activity is the primary driver of climate change. The effect from people is miniscule to negligible
2) this change is demonstrably bad
False….. it is not capable of being demonstrated or proved to be bad, or anything else, because people are NOT the cause of climate change. Besides, all the doom-sayers of global warming continue to prove their arguements have no basis in fact, and they keep changing their arguements every time their previous ones turn up false.
If everyone will remember, their ORIGINAL theories insisted that the climate would continue to rise in-step with CO2 emissions, it didn’t even allow for a “pause” in global warming. However, CO2 has risen, sometimes alarmingly so, and yet the global climate has NOT, in, what, 18 years??
3) the cost of mitigating the change is less than the cost of that change.
FALSE…. (unless you’re Al Gore’s banker) We are dumping billions upon billions into the bank accts and funds owned by all these “global warming experts,” spending untold tens and hundreds of billions more on “studies” and regulatory commitees and international groups and more, not to mention how much this administration is spending on perpetuating the lie in order to justify the money to begin with. Yet our nations debt, (and our individual taxes,) continue to mount at an unsustainable rate…… The climate??? Not only has it “paused” for some 18 yrs, (and others can, I’m sure, help me out with the exact numbers) but hasn’t it actually cooled for the last couple years?

Apologies for the double post, Word Press seems to glitch when you log in. I refreshed and my comment was no where to be seen. So I commented again. I’ll have to watch that.
Its still quite amazing that the Schmidt is looking to paid $539 Million dollars from the federal government for a project that has already failed to produce energy at anything like a reasonable price (disproving their proposed solution for AGW). Asking for the money at the same time as lobbying that the problem exists is a blatant conflict of interest. To deny the possibility of debate is unscientific and undemocratic.

Here’s an idea don’t use google for ANYTHING if you can help it. What is so amazing is that these “smart” people are so gullible. It just shows you that common sense/skeptical nature and being tech savvy/smart don’t always go together. Unbelievable! The problems with these kinds of statements/beliefs is that it leads you to doubt/motives of the so called best and brightest.

I dont, Ixquicks just fine:-0
and I dont get privacy invaded, and swamped with ads n crap,
dont know why anyone over teens uses the goog,
used a friends pc the other day
was staggered at the totally wrong results and so many spammy sites.

It is the “idiot savant” syndrome. There is no question that Schmidt is an outstanding business man. But that does not make him omniscient. Yet so many media prima donnas think that since they know something, they know it all. It is not restricted to media creations. Many PhDs are the same way. I would seek out his advice on getting my website at the top of a search list. I would not seek his advice on repairing my cataract.

It’s the story of all humanity. People master their special turf and fancy that they know everything. Travelers to foreign countries. Phds beyond their specialties. It often ends up Bugs Bunny, stars swirling around his head, as he implores, somebody get the license number of that truck.

Chris:
Kind of like how scientists who don’t study climate think they know more about that subject than the vast majority of climate scientists.

Self-selected so called “scientists” who hide behind unknown “peer-review” pay-pals in their government-funded research centers and government-funded associations while hiding data and manipulating their methods, eh?
“Vast majority of climate scientists = 75 self-selected answers out of 13,500 polled, right?

Please! Get a real source! Wiki is not it. If you are clueless on why, I would suggest asking a second grade teacher. Or learn to Google (Bing, Duck, Duck, Go is better) William Connolley.
The actual numbers are 10,257 survery, 3146 responded, 79 culled, of which 2 additional were eliminated to get 75 of 77. There is no science in that. There is no statistical meaning either. It is a push poll. You eliminate everything that does not conform to your predetermined conclusion.
and those are all facts. And not a single one from Wiki.

@ Chris… “Kind of like how scientists who don’t study climate think they know more about that subject than the vast majority of climate scientists”…. when climate statements that are wrong in biology or physics then yes they do know more. Let’s use my favorite, tree rings. Or let’s delve deep into how heat flows from a colder surface to a warmer one. Or gradients that reflect energy. Which BS line CAGW gives that hasn’t been trotted out as truth? Want to go on about your models? Pick one. Stronger more frequent hurricanes? Is the Arctic still melting? No more snow? It’s worse than they thought? Nothing is happening outside of the norm is it? Unless you put an adjective in front of it or readjust the data.

Chris; “Is the Arctic still melting?”Yes.
Fast forward to 27/12/2014 and we find Arctic sea ice extent, according to the NSIDC, is approaching (quickly) the same levels recorded in 2002. But why say, and I quote;“Arctic sea ice coverage in 2014 is the sixth-lowest recorded since 1978,”?
Is it because 1978-79 was the peak of Arctic sea ice in recent times? NOAA has been recording Artic sea ice extent since 1973 via satellites, as the graph below shows, which is from the IPCC AR1 (FAR) WG1, chapter 7.http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/SeaiceextentIPCCAR1_zps93416e03.jpg
Now isn’t that inconvenient!

I am Professor Feynman, in spite of this suit-coat. I usually give lectures in shirtsleeves, but when I started out of the hotel this morning my wife said, “You must wear a suit.” I said, “But I usually give lectures in shirtsleeves.” She said, “Yes, but this time you don’t know what you’re talking about so you had better make a good impression. . . . .” So, I got a coat.
Richard Feynman, “What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific
Culture in Modern Society” (Galileo Symposium, Italy, 1964)
reprinted in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short
Works of Richard P. Feynman (Jeffrey Robbins, ed., 1999)

This Chris guy has sucked us into a useless illogical off topic argument. It is time to stop replying to him. The issue is not about smoking, the issue is not about Hartland, the issue is not about the Oregonian Petition, or if there is a consensus view, or who is a climate scientist and who isn’t the issue is about Google and their stance on climate change and is it doing more harm than good. None of the issues Chris has mentioned have anything to do with Climate Change or Google’s stance on it.

This Chris guy has sucked us into a useless illogical off topic argument.
==================
Agreed. Here is the real story. Google wants the taxpayers to bail them out, so they are talking nice to help Obama with his Legacy.
The Ivanpah solar electric generating plant is owned by Google and renewable energy giant NRG, which are responsible for paying off their federal loan. If approved by the U.S. Treasury, the two corporations will not use their own money, but taxpayer cash to pay off 30 percent of the cost of their plant, but taxpayers will receive none of the millions in revenues the plant will generate over the next 30 years.http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/11/08/world-largest-solar-plant-applying-for-federal-grant-to-pay-off-its-federal/

Joel Kotkin had this to say about Google yesterday:
…….“Far from being liberating and diffusing wealth, the emerging information economy serves “a new tiny class of people,” the tech visionary Jaron Lanier argues, particularly at companies like Google, Facebook and Apple that are repeatedly accused of abusing private information. As Google’s Eric Schmidt put it: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
In the coming years Google and other digital heavyweights hope to involve themselves ever more in our most mundane activities, whether by monitoring our physical functions or figuring out ways to profit from our inner-most thoughts. Yet the vision at places like Google goes well beyond the mundane, aspiring to powers once believed to be the province of divinities”…….http://www.joelkotkin.com/content/001029-our-father-who-art-apple-store-decline-christmas-and-looming-tech-nightmare?utm

Exactly.
The things Microsoft was doing back in the 90s that got Janet Reno after them were mere child’s play compared to the horrendous violations of privacy and accumulation of ill-gotten cash by these left-centric companies. Someone needs to make a stand, SOON. They are going to bring down our civilization, and that is NOT hyperbole.
Isn’t it funny, the very same people who rant and rail against ANYTHING that the right might support (like intelligence gathering on terror suspects), but willingly cooperate on the most egregious breaches of privacy for their own financial gain.

CodeTech,
Yes, but that was pre-Obama.
I notice that everything Obama does [not what he says; what he actually does] is anti-American, or is designed to bring this country down.
Who would have believed it, if you had told folks thirty years ago that the U.S. and Mexican governments would be putting out joint instruction booklets on how and where Mexican citizens can illegally cross over into the U.S.? And booklets in Spanish, paid for by the U.S. and distributed in Mexico by the government, explaining how illegals can take full advantage of all the welfare programs intended for American citizens once they enter this country illegally. No one would have believed you.
And regarding our so-called “torture”: waterboarding is no more torture than making a prisoner very uncomfortable by other means. It causes no damage. There is no physical harm. And if Obama had started it, the Left would swoon at it’s effectiveness. Former V.P. Dick Cheney has stated repeatedly that waterboarding has saved many American lives. But since it was done under the Bush presidency, it is automaticallly a Bad Thing.
I can only hope that there is an equal and opposite reaction to the current Administration, and that a real pro-American president is elected, whose goal is to make America #1 again. But that will be a very big job, after the Obama fiasco.

…this is a ‘ditto’ to dbstealey’s comment on Obama and the “politically correct” left… (and, a little, not entirely, off main-subject) but how many folks noticed that this last pres election was the FIRST time in this country’s history that the “American Dream” was demonized? And far FAR worse… how many citizens bought into it???
“Let’s lie our way to the top!” Isn’t that the Schmidt, Obama, Gore way??

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.

danalloso:
I don’t know. The key point is: windmills and solar panels could NEVER have a positive ROI, but for taxpayer/energy rate surcharges.
Coal may or may not receive tax/surcharge help — the key is, coal doesn’t NEED them.
Nor does nuclear (that industry just needs the government to unbind that power giant from profit-crippling GOVERNMENT regulations).
Go, nuclear power! #(:))

Janice: “I don’t know. The key point is: windmills and solar panels could NEVER have a positive ROI, but for taxpayer/energy rate surcharges.
Coal may or may not receive tax/surcharge help — the key is, coal doesn’t NEED them.
Nor does nuclear (that industry just needs the government to unbind that power giant from profit-crippling GOVERNMENT regulations).”
So…we take those subsidies from coal and nuclear power, since they don’t need them, and give them to solar instead. No harm, right?

You are obviously unaware of a couple of important facts regarding subsidies . . .
The subsidies for fossil fuels are in the form of tax allowances for resource depletion which are the same as capital allowances afforded to all businesses including so called green ones. A large slice of what you think of as subsidies are in the form of reduced bills for the end users where paying full price would result in hardship for those end users such as the old, poor and infirm. None of these represent direct payments to energy companies.
Even allowing for all of those subsidies, and not including them in the subsidies given to renewables the actual subsidies paid in cash to renewables is an order of magnitude greater than those for fossil fuels when calculated on a per kW/hr basis. When calculated on a proper like for like basis it is two orders of magnitude more for renewables.
Oh, and lest we forget please don’t overlook the huge taxes that government receives from the users of oil based products in particular.
The subsidy argument against fossil fuels is simply propaganda that can only be propagated by the ignorant or the wilfully deceptive. Just in case you are considering bringing up the so called “uncosted” damage from using fossil fuels I would point out that these have already been priced in as is evidenced by the incredibly clean environments that the countries who use the wealth created by the use of fossil fuels show. That is the other side of the argument, the huge positive effects of cheap, ubiquitous and reliable energy has brought to those who embrace it.
When renewables can compete with fossil/nuclear/hydro on a cost and ease of use basis we will all adopt them. Until that day they are just a vehicle for wealth transfer to the gamers of the crisis de jour.

The same Joe and Maria who when the weather gets really cold try to chose between heating or eating and are found dead of hypothermia due to energy poverty. But these poor people don’t matter, their deaths are not even remarked upon. After all someone has to pay the subsidies to support the otherwise unsustainable susatainable energy generation. It might as well be the poor as the progressives wouldn’t want it to be one of their own that died.

Chris says:…give them to solar instead. No harm, right?
Chris has never heard of Bastiat’s Broken Window fallacy. Of course there is harm. The taxpayers are getting fleeced by subsidies.
We should eliminate all subsidies. If energy production can’t pay it’s own way, to hell with it. Anything that can’t pay it’s own way deserves to go out of business.
Bring back coal power! Coal is clean energy, despite what the ignorant naysayers claim, and it is cheap energy.
Cheap energy = national wealth.
Cheap energy = warm poor folks
Cheap energy = a thriving biosphere
It’s a win-win-win!

Climate Science = “Borg” science.
Borgs; Star Trek;
The Borg were a pseudo-species of cybernetic beings, or cyborgs, from the Delta Quadrant. No single individual truly existed within the Borg Collective (with the possible sole exception of the Borg Queen), as all Borg were linked into a hive mind. Their ultimate goal was the attainment of ‘perfection’ through the forcible assimilation of diverse sentient species, technologies, and knowledge. As a result, the Borg were among the most powerful and feared entities in the galaxy, without really being a true species at all.

Probably read that article about those guys that got stuck on a ship at the south pole. It’s a WARNING… they did such good work, and tongue in cheek, the penguin colony has declined because of global warming. They have to travel 40 miles to the sea now. How to twist an inconvenient story. Of course some of the skeptics jumped on the ill fated cruise claiming global warming was over, ( but we know better ) Oh those bashful heroes!! What’s the big deal they say, the assistant scientists were rescued. … With stories like that, who wouldn’t believe in global warming. Just melts the heart of even the coldest denier. /sarc

… as of December 25, it’s been 3,347 days since a Category 3-5 hurricane hit the US mainland; this is by far the longest such stretch since record-keeping began in 1900, if not since the American Civil War.
There’s a change we can live with.

I give up. You can read the Google statement on WUWT earlier site.
This is the text of my comment.
Here is my opinion as to the real reason for Schmidt’s statement.
Google deals with governments at high levels and does not wish to annoy them. Some of these governments are “true believers” in AGW, or sensitive to the concept. (Google is having some issues in Europe just now.) So this statement is to placate those governments, in spite of Google’s recent conclusions from study RE>C.
At that level it’s all politics.

And they are forced into a double denialist corner unable to explain why earth’s temperature has not ‘obeyed’ their lame models for ~18 years or why the current level of warmer temperature has miserably failed to produce a “climate catastrophe”.

Reblogged this on Sierra Foothill Commentary and commented:
Due to the Google’s official positions on climate change, whenever possible I have chosen to use alternative search engines and on-line tools. It is impossible to escape all of Google’s reach, but one can minimise the engagement.

IF Google should go on facts not on political belief, then none of their leading persons would go on babbling about Climate Change due to Human activity!
* In the world of Science where Theories of Science is used, there exist no such thing as Everyone knows nor is Consensus a Scientific term – only a political one…
There are several Fallacies in argumentation, Norah4science page English text to be taken into account when ever someone calls for “consensus”. Consensus is a political term with no connection what so ever to Theories of Science.The new faith of IPCC: Humans are Universe’s centre
People are allowed to be stupid…. but it’s not wise showing stupidness off…
Where have all the money gone and where have all the basic knowledge learnt in 7th grade, such as Archimedes Principle, Photosynthesis, the simple fact that seasons change every year depends on the Earth’s tilt and solar incidence angle…..
The answer my friend MUST be blowing in the wind.
Might have been heard by one ear but lost in “action”…

Maybe Eric didn’t get the memo – there is a major political, economic and military war in progress in the Middle East over – guess what? – control of fossil fuel supplies, transportation and markets. Projects of hundreds of billion dollars that will provide trillions in sales of fossil fuels are in the balance, along with the economies of many of the world’s superpowers. This is what the big boys are up to these days.
Do you think Putin or the leader of Iran will take Eric’s call and agree to stop producing and shipping fossil fuels “for the sake of the children?” China has already pissed on Obama. Will Eric have bettter luck? Oh but wait, it’s the head of *Google* calling – That’s different… /sarc off
The fossil fuel economy that drives the world economy is in no danger from the likes of Eric.

Schmidt is pro-choice and only concerned about surviving children and grandchildren. He supports an unprecedented violation of human rights on the order of millions annually. Not only a violation of human rights, but premeditated murder through lethal injection, decapitation, and dismemberment of wholly innocent human lives. Schmidt et al believe in spontaneous conception of human life that is used to rationalize abortion of unwanted human lives when they are uniquely vulnerable. It’s difficult to take these people seriously, when they hold such extreme hypocritical positions on morality and science.
We should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying. Right, Schmidt? You don’t really believe in the fairytale of spontaneous conception, do you? It calls into question the substance and motive of your other firmly held beliefs.

I would prefer to address each issue separately on their merits. Unfortunately, Schmidt et al set the mood and atmosphere for this debate. They want to establish a moral frame of reference and argue from a higher ground, indefensible though it may be. Perhaps we can indulge them just long enough to focus their attention. I have responded to Schmidt on his terms.

Thanks, Paul and Chris, for speaking truth to power.
Google already seem to lower the ranks of skeptic’s websites.
Regarding the double standard, and the willful ignorance of how science works, Schmidt’s interview is truly shameless and offensive.

By the time I read to the end of the comments I forgot what I was going to comment on….
Good stuff all the way around.
The thing that popped into my head after thinking about forcing, after reading the base article and some subsequent posts.
Have we ever really quantified CO2 atmospheric injection from volcanic activities?
Is there a reanalysis of the Pinotubu affect as an example?
I think our new sat tool will provide for such, if permitted. Think about what we have already learned from it recently…..http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov
Coming Soon!

Neither Schmidt nor Obama wrote their speeches; some one else, someone in the PR or HR department, wrote them with a eye mostly to corporate, politically correct positioning and individual (corporate officer) social status. As a result, neither considers himself accountable for his words; he was a mouthpiece for sensitive thoughts that show the Corporate or the Government has the “best interestes of the majority” in mind.
You cannot have a debate with someone who parrots the party line it is not ‘his” truths, misinformation or lies you find abhorrent, but those of “others”, people who mean well but may have overstated themselves due to enthusiasm for doing the Right Thing. If accountabiity were real, Al Gore would have fixed the errors in his movie, and Micheal Mann would have updated his tree-ring graphs.
We live in a dangerous time. The Patriot Act passed and exists with minimal fuss because it came from a point of view that trying to do the noble thing is more important than achieving the noble thing. Green energy is a fantasy that is beyond reproach because if it were economically and technologically reasonable, we would support it; that it is not either of these does not mean the push should be stopped, because, in principle, it is part of the Right or Noble thing.
Google rides the wave because the elite maintain, even enhance, their financial, political and social positions by standing for the Right and Noble goals, unachievable or ultimately destructive they may be. Their wealth and power cushion them from their errors. How do we get beyond this?
There are only two ways. The first is regulatory obstruction, in which legal challenges at the municipal, state/provincial or federal level grind away and stop these processes through time and (for example) by removing tax or subsidy support for them (like de-funding the UN). The second is revolution – not necessarily through violence, though historically that has been the way of the world – but by the revolution of either the ballot box (“Through the Bums Out”) or corporate, municipal, state/province and federal non-compliance. People refuse, and the numbers who refuse are simply too great for enforcement, a civil disobedience, like Pennsylvania simply saying they will not comply with Clean Air Acts that result in the (premature) termination of coal-fired powerplants, or will not allow the collection of taxes that are collected from car manufactures in their State and transferred out-of-State to Tesla to support electric car manufacturing plants elsewhere.
It worked before to end the 55 mph Federal speed limits. The principle just needs to be expanded.

I’m not really sure why you’re bringing this up again. It’s not new, and as noted, the renewables thing has since been shot down from within Google by their own engineers. Hopefully Eric will make more time to actually look at the facts for himself before he spends more time on the golf course.

Doug said
Quote
The first is regulatory obstruction, in which legal challenges at the municipal, state/provincial or federal level grind away and stop these processes
Unquote
I disagree, the best way to end the EPA tyranny is to force it to do its job. They found co2 dangerous, they issued the endangerment notice , so they must enforce it. Stop soft drinks adding co2, stop co2 in beer, stop co2 farming, reduce emissions of co2 at all levels. If not they are failing in their fiduciary duty.

“… and the 31,487 US scientists who have signed the Oregon Petition…” – Still holding on to this sham huh? Only a third of the signatories have PhDs and in who knows what. Oh, but clearly a doctor of Sociology would know better about the truth of climate change because everyone with a PhD in climate science is part of a global conspiracy to destroy Capitalism and get more grant money. Pathetic.

James,
You are confused. Every co-signer had to have a degree in at least one of the hard sciences. Sociology would not qualify anyone, unless that degree was in addition to a degree in the hard sciences. Even a medical doctor is precluded from signing — unless he earned a degree in one of the hard sciences. Compare that hackground with the rabble of climate alarmist scientists like Lew and others.
Out of approximately 32,000 OISM co-signers, about 9,000 also have PhD’s.
Look at it this way: taking every petition, poll, and every other co-signing statement by the alarmist crowd, where each person is identified, then all of those alarmist names would not equal one-tenth the number of OISM co-signers.
Thus, the clear consensus [for whatever that is worth in science; alarmists seem to think it’s important] is heavily on the side of scientific skeptics.
Yes, climate skeptics have the overwhelming ‘consensus’ on their side. Sorry about that. But skeptics didn’t start the ‘consensus’ food fight.

dbstealey: “You are confused. Every co-signer had to have a degree in at least one of the hard sciences.”
No. Every co-signer had to CLAIM to have a degree in at least one of the hard sciences. The Oregon Institute did not initially verify any of the signatories’ backgrounds, leading to many fake names being attached to the petition. The Institute claims to have since verified 95% of the signatories, but has not released its methodology for doing so.
Furthermore, only 39 of the signatories had a background in climate science. That’s less than 1% of the number of signatories.
“Look at it this way: taking every petition, poll, and every other co-signing statement by the alarmist crowd, where each person is identified, then all of those alarmist names would not equal one-tenth the number of OISM co-signers.”
This is so absurdly false that I have a hard time believing that you actually believe it.

“Furthermore, only 39 of the signatories had a background in climate science. That’s less than 1% of the number of signatories”.
Give it up Chris. “in climate science”
That’s like me saying: “Only construction workers have “right” to fault the design of a building.”
So, please go fine the missing “Hot Spot” and prove Mr. James Henson right before I demand my tax dollar be spent on something other than “climate science”.

Chris,
Congratulations! You’ve worked your troll magic and taken this thread off- topic. Good job!
Edward teller signed the Oregon Petition. You can add up all the Michael Manns and James Hansens and such and multiply by ten and that dim product will come nowhere close to the luminescence of the mind of Edward Teller.

By the OISM’s standards, the USA has about 10,600,000 people who are qualified to sign the petition.
31,000 represents about 0.3% of the qualified population
..
In other words, about 99.7% of the people holding degrees in “hard sciences” did not sign the petition.
..
Besides, science is not done via petition.

David your comment is clueless in its baseless ignorant assumptions.
If your statement is true it should be easy for you to do your own petition stating the opposite of the Oregon Petition; something to the affect that…
“The human caused increase in CO2 will be catastrophic to humans, causing disastrous increase in droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and sea level rise.”
Now find me such a petition. By the way you must use the same criteria as the Oregon Petition does, meaning social scientist need not apply.
David, I think a cat will have your tongue for a long time.

Alan,
It is very unlikely that the real Edward Teller signed that petition. He was one of the first prominent people to speak of the danger of climate change and the greenhouse effect of CO2.
Someone may have signed Teller’s name, but since the group behind the petition has not revealed how they verified the identities of the signers, there is no way to know whose names are real and whose are forgeries.

@Chris & ‘socrates’:
I like how you both argue by assertion. You haven’t given a single verified example to support your belief, and you haven’t taken my challenge to produce even one alarmist survey with anywhere near the OISM’s number of names.
As Janice says below:…do remember: The burden of proof is on the detractors of the petition to discredit it. So far, they have not. Not one shred of negating evidence.
All you are doing is emitting bluster. Both of you.

Socks says:Besides, science is not done via petition.
As an erstwhile commenter used to respond:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
‘Science via petition’ is the alarmists’ “consensus” argument. But when the shoe is on the other foot, skeptics can’t use it??HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

This makes eminently more sense: We see your 97% (that we’ve debunked) and raise it with an equally debunkable OP, then complain when you try to use yours and don’t let me use mine. Too much logic and critical thinking in that methodology for most, don’tcha think DB? Well played.
I’ve had your number all along, haven’t I?

Chris, there is no climate change. Have you missed the fact that for the last 18 years there has been no warming whatsoever? Do you know that the greenhouse theory of IPCC has been forecasting warming for every one of these 18 years and getting nothing? Do you know that in science a theory that predicts impossible things is considered invalid and must be discarded? Do you understand that 18 wrong predictions in a row is enough to prove that it belongs in the waste basket of history? Simply because it does not obey the laws of nature. An alternative greenhouse theory that does obey the laws of nature is called the Miskolczi greenhouse theory. It predicts what we see: addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, contrary to what you have been told, does not warm the world. That takes care of the alleged greenhouse warming that IPCC has been babbling about.. With that, anthropogenic global warming or AGW is proven to be non-existent. It is nothing more than a pseudo-scientific fantasy, cooked up by over-eager climate workers to justify their greenhouse hypothesis which has turned out to be false. But based on this falsehood, we are subjected to irrational laws of emission control and other worthless and very expensive efforts to stop a non-existent global warming.

CarbonBrief, funded by the European Climate Foundation, recycles a September piece targetting students, this time for a Christmas audience. Phil Jones’ response is fascinating!
25 Dec: CarbonBrief: Simon Evans: 25 inspirational texts about climate change
Did Santa bring any of these this Christmas?
***We asked 25 thinkers, writers and journalists a simple question: What books or readings inspired you to get involved in climate change-related work?…
Phil Jones, Director of research at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia: “…When I started it was climate research. There wasn’t climate change then!
“We have prospective MSc students wanting to read something before they come. I always recommend the Rough Guide to Climate Change – which seems now in its third edition. Not really inspirational, but gets across simply many of the points we want to instill into a new set of students.”http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/12/25-inspirational-texts-about-climate-change-christmas-2014/
CarbonBrief: 25 inspirational texts about climate change
15 Sep 2014, 16:15
Simon Evans
Around this time each September, thousands of students will go off to study climate change at university. But sometimes climate and environmental issues can be pretty dry.
***So we asked 25 thinkers, writers and journalists a simple question: What books or readings inspired you to get involved in climate change-related work?..
COMMENT by Bob Henson:
Excellent compilation–my list of “need to read this” books has just expanded. Many thanks to Phil Jones for the kind words about my “Rough Guide to Climate Change”! The latest (fourth) edition has just been released under a new name and publisher: “The Thinking Person’s Guide to Climate Change,” by AMS Books (American Meteorological Society)…http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/09/25-inspirational-texts-about-climate-change/

wickedwenchfan
Can you please address the criticisms of the Origon Petition, specifically that most of the signatures are faked or not from scientists?

Your claim is false: that most of the signatures are faked or from non-degreed, non-technical, non-“scientific” people who ARE qualified to analyze heat transfer, chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, fluid flow, analysis, computer programming, optics, reflectivity, seismology, dynamic or static modeling or any other physics-dominated field.

Some information to help you WWF:
1. http://www.petitionproject.org/
2. http://www.petitionproject.org/qualifications_of_signers.php
3. “A 12-page review article about the human-caused global warming hypothesis is circulated with the petition. To view the entire article in html, 150-dpi PDF, 300-dpi PDF, 600-dpi PDF, Spanish or figures alone in powerpoint or flash, click on the appropriate item in this sentence.”
{http://www.petitionproject.org/review_article.php}
Okay. That should get you started.However (ahem) … do remember: The burden of proof is on the detractors of the petition to discredit it. So far, they have not. Not one shred of negating evidence.
That is, just as the null hypothesis wrt human CO2 emissions causing catastrophic climate change is: NO KNOWN FACTS PROVE AGW IS TRUE, I.E., THE AGW HYPOTHESIS MUST BE PROVEN.
So, too, the null hypothesis with the Oregon Petition is: NO KNOWN FACTS PROVE (to any degree at all, much less a significant one) THE OREGON SIGNATURES INVALID, I.E., THE AGWer’s HYPOTHESIS THAT THEY ARE INVALID (to a significant degree) MUST BE PROVEN.

Oh, brother! Did I call AGW a “hypothesis?” Aaaaaarrgh.
It does not rise even to THAT level. AGW is, as of this second, mere unsupported conjecture. A “hypothesis” could be proven false: AGW cannot. Given the facts known about oceans and volcanoes and air and ocean circulation and the troposphere, etc… AGW IS SPECULATION.

“However (ahem) … do remember: The burden of proof is on the detractors of the petition to discredit it. So far, they have not. Not one shred of negating evidence.”
Both of these assertions are false.
1) The Oregon Institute claims that the 30,000 signers are all real scientists. But they’ve offered no proof and no explanation of how they verified the identities of every signer. No one is under any obligation to believe their claims at face value. They should release their methodology–you know, like real scientists do–if they want this petititon taken seriously outside the deniersphere. The burden of proof is on them.
2) The Oregon Institute admitted that many fake names were submitted and initially approved. It was only later, after critics had called them out, that they went through and purged many of the names. They now claim to have verified the identities of 95% of signatories, but again, have offered no proof of that claim. The initial shoddiness of the petititon certainly counts as at least a :shred of negating evidence” for the merits of this petititon.
3) Only 39 of the signatories even claim to be climate scientists. That is less than a percent of alll signatories. That alone is enough to discredit the petition. The opinions of scientists who have not studied climate in depth are irrelevant.

Thank you Janice Moore. Very helpful. I was recently faced with the following propaganda when debating with someone about the “consensus”. It seems NASA are no longer using the study that led to the 97% claim to back up the number, but listing organisations that agree with it. If you, or anyone in here, has something that can specifically address this page on NASA’s website, I would appreciate it.

““God’s Law is the mediator between people if they are to get along well and are mutually beneficial to one another. It is up to you to learn to take the Bible seriously (no more discounting of God’s instructions about life that we find in the first 5 books of the Scriptures), study it, and make it part of your genetic makeup. Evolution is no more true of God’s standards of right and wrong than it is of creation. Community has been lost in our largely apostate age because we have forgotten God’s Law.” –Arthur Robinson, initiator of the Oregon Petition
Yes, I am sure this completely sane and rational man conducted the verification process for this petition with nothing but the most stringent standards.

Oh dear Chris, we’ve reached the bottom of your barrel and there’s some pretty mucky stuff there.
‘I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei of Florence, being 70 years old… swear that I have always believed, believe now and, with God’s help, will in the future believe all that the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church doth hold, preach and teach. But since, after having been admonished by this Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the Universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not the center of the same and that it moves.’
It would be tempting to show you the rack too but we’ll rely on the slower method (and more painful probably to some in the end) of sticking to science and truth.
‘If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties,…’

wickedwenchfan,
Who are you asking? And, what exactly are you asking?
The OISM has about 33,000 names. A few might be fake names, put in by ethics-free alarmists. But they are weeded out as soon as they are found, and IIRC, there have never been more than a handful opf names that are not real. Out of 33,000 co-signers, even if 90% are accurate, that is still far more than ten times the number of signatures from the entire alarmist side.
Probably more than 99% of the OISM signatures are legitimate. But instead of worrying about that, why not discuss what they all co-signed?
The OISM Petition says, in essence, that CO2 is harmless, and that it is beneficial to the biosphere. That view is in contradiction to the alarmist view.
Alarmists promote the “carbon” scare. You will have to decide for yourself which view is more accurate.
@Chris:
All you are doing is emitting bluster. No names named. And “many” can mean a dozen names… out of about 33,000 names.
Once more: where is your alarmist petition? You don’t have one. All you have is Cook’s bogus “77 of 79” nonsense.
Face reality: the ‘consensus’ is very heavily on the side of scientific skeptics. The false claim that your alarmist clique is the so-called ‘consensus’ is BS. It just isn’t true.
If I am wrong… post the names of your alarmist scientists. If you can. I say you can’t. So put up or shut up.

I already have. Regardless of what scientist have or have not agreed or disagreed with the global warming claim, I have determined for myself that CO2 is not responsible or dangerous for temperature changes.
I would however like to have a link that officially responds to the claims of the warmists about the [Oregon] Petition.

Mr. WWF,
The claims are completely unsupported. Thus, there is no response.
That is, the Oregon Petition’s detractors have not even presented enough of a case to shift the burden of proof to the other side. In a court of law, the Oregon Petition Defendants would win on a Motion to Dismiss because the Plaintiff AGWers have presented NO evidence that would make it in the least likely that they could prevail on the merits.
Your persevering WUWT pal,
Janice

It should also be noted that this petition was only open to scientists from the United States. Since it was a petition addressed to the government of the United States, it is reasonable for it to only be signed by U.S. citizens. But when one considers that despite that limitation, they STILL got over 30,000 signatures, it truly is an impressive feat.
The one criticism that “Chris” levels about only 1% being “climate scientists” comes from this page where there is a breakdown of what the number of signatures are by degree type.http://www.petitionproject.org/qualifications_of_signers.php
Indeed, only 39 listed themselves as “climatologists” or about 1%. That’s quite immaterial however. If one examines the training of people like Briffa, Hanson, Mann, and many other “climate scientists” they are not “climatologists” either. They are people with expertise in physics or astronomy or biology who have sub-specialized by focusing their learned science on climate. When a “climate scientist” calculates the effective black body temperature of earth, she used Stefan-Boltzmann Law to do it. When an electrical engineer wants to understand how much a component will heat up under load, she uses Stefan-Boltzmann Law to do it. The notion that climate science is some priesthood that nobody but a climate scientist can enter is simply willful deceit.

Wicked,
There are a number of links within this wiki that you can follow to find supplemental information. Not sure if this will lead to what you seek, but there may be a lead to follow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition

Happy Holidays DB,
I’ve missed ya! So what number is that?
The person requested information about the OP, I provided a Wiki with numerous links so that person can research for themselves, and DB who has decided for any and all that providing a Wiki with links therefore means …………………………….
Can anyone help me understand the linkage? DB & I have a hard time communicating?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Up_With_That%3F . I suppose this is completely biased too?
Db, as your lesser, I’m asking for your help. Please, please got thru in detail the wiki I provided about the OP and provide specific indications of bias so I can understand as I’m obviously incapable of doing so for myself. Since my entire world revolves around the need for your acceptance I probably won’t sleep for a week if I don’t get it. When I look at the OP website and the wiki side by side the correlate fairly well, but then again, I’m not a reputable source for that evaluation as DB has me neatly boxed in to some kind of number……………

Ooooo! Just the thought made me all tingly. Unless your palms sweat.
So your link to a WUWT post on Connolly therefore makes the wiki on the OP as biased an inaccurate?
Therefore, then, if I post a link that to a post that WUWT has a bias (and I think we can agree that it just might) therefore any and all references on WUWT are invalidated? Db, the education you provide is once again top notch and indisputable? Thank you for that as always.
Oh, and I noticed you didn’t address the wiki directly. Nice deflection. So what on the wiki was inaccurate? I missed that part.

Phil,
I can see how one can get angry with Connolly and not wish to use his product, just as folks are expressing anger with google and talking of making a change, but if those who chose to do so do not take the time and effort to compare the data then what is the point?
When I compare the wiki with the OP website I get reasonable use. Phil, be honest with me (DB won’t as he seems to not know how) did you check for yourself?

@Danny Thomas – you make a classic mistake. The evidence of the tampering of Wiki by Connolley is incontrovertible. So ALL data sourced from there must be viewed with a jaundiced eye. If you find the same information, at an untainted site, that merely shows that Connolley is not omnipotent. But Wiki cannot be used as a primary source. Period. Even beyond Connolley, any second grade teacher will tell you that.
But just because it is on Wiki, does not make it false. It makes it suspect. And anyone with even a modicum of ingenuity can find a primary source to either validate, or invalidate the wiki information.
Period.
I have checked. I have found enough errors, and not only in Climate Science, on Wiki (e.g. See Sally Hemmings myth) that I use it as a starting point if that. I never use it as an authority.
Neither should you.

Phil,
Rest assured I’d never cite it as a “source”, but also would not toss out the associated data w/o first checking (as I have done) to compare for myself. The OP site and the wiki match quite well. There is no mistake as I’m not offering it as a reference to substantiate anything, but instead as a resource for one requesting more information about the OP. I chose to do so as the wiki has numerous links. Please make note, that I made ZERO representation and only provided the link. My good buddy DB took issue with that choice and if he or anyone doesn’t care for where the information was acquired and doesn’t bother to check the information then that’s just being lazy on their part.
Tossing at all wiki’s due to WUWT having an issue with Connolly is absurd. Tossing out all data found on Google due to WUWT having an issue with Schmidt is absurd. As with any encyclopedia, it’s not a source but instead is a resource.
Just like Willis shares. It’s not about ME, it IS about the data. Some are just to lazy or closed minded to check for themselves. I appreciate that you have chosen to do the checking, but not all do.
The wiki for the OP has numerous links embedded that the person who wished more information about the OP might find helpful. So if you followed the thread, and took a look at the application to meet the other posters request, would this not be about as good of a use of a wiki?
I could have posted the OP site, and 40 others (the embedded links), or used “the right tool for the right job” and post the wiki instead. No integrity in question. Agreed? You offered that you use it as a “starting point” and that’s exactly why I chose to offer it to the other poster as I see that as an appropriate use.

@Danny Thomas – again you make a critical mistake. WUWT did not create the scandal, nor did they make it so. They REPORTED it. Your insistence that it is somehow a “WUWT” issue brands you as a den1er of facts. Frankly I do not care where you get your facts, as I always search to the source. But you seem to take offense, that since you used Wiki as your PRIMARY source, and were called on it, you have to somehow create a narrative to defend your faux pas.
As I am sure you are not in second grade, you are free to use Wiki as your primary source. But then no one is going to follow that white rabbit down its hole.
I merely tried to educate you. As I said, I have no dog in the fight. But you are welcome to continue with your quest. And ignore the education.

Phil,
Please. I did not cite it as a source, I offered a resource and I once again go back to Willis’ point of view. You (and DB) can continue to wish to paint me as “making mistakes” as I don’t have a dog in the fight as you say between Wiki and WUWT. What I chose to do was compare the data from the wiki with the OP website, and found a good match. With the additional benefit of the backstory of issues which I do not evaluate for validity but felt the poster requesting information might find useful, instead of only providing the OP point of view I chose the wiki for a broader view. The wiki links to the OP site and Heartland, and many others.
Some may wish to provide the information that only supports one side. Some may wish to provide more substantial and alternative data w/o offering any commentary whatsoever allowing the consumer of the data to analyse for themselves. You may chose the former, but I dare say the if one from the AGW side of the CC discussion did this they would be run thru the ringer here. I chose the latter and still get resistance.
My hope is Wicked finds the summary useful, the links more rounding, and that they find that which they seek. I’ve offered no guidance other than the resource.

Phil,
Seriously? There is a big difference between suggesting someone read this article, and a citation of an article but you know that already and are just trying to damn all of the wiki because of Connolly.
Did you compare the OP site data with that of the wiki? Specifically, what about the wiki is inaccurate? Not interested in generalities as my point is that it’s about the data and the the package in which the data is contained.
Geeeez. Person asks for information on a topic, and I suggest an encyclopedia for them to read w/o any commentary and I’m told that was inappropriate? Really?
I look forward to the analysis between the two. Sans that, can we not just agree that this is much ado about nothing? Lacking the analysis, I see zero problem with offering the wiki. That is done by others, on numerous topics on this very blog. Where is the uproar on those?
I understand that the wiki discusses things that some with a particular agenda may find unhelpful for their arguments, but that in no way makes the information invalid does it?
No one has hijacked my access, and I stand fully behind the choice. I sure hope you’ve never suggested a book to someone to read unless you take full responsibility for all the content therein.

@Danny Thomas – LOL- Straw man much? I stated clearly, up front, that Wiki should not be used as a primary source. I offered the example of C0nn0lley. But he was not the only basis for my claim. I also offered additional resources for you to check (which you have ignored). Then you want to come back and try to wrap yourself around your own mistake and claim it was “just visiting”??? LOL
Please, you were given some friendly advice. But no one ordered you to do anything, so you are free to ignore it. And of course be shown wrong more often than not when others use real sources to refute your contentions.

Phil,
I call your strawman, and raise you a deflection.
I notice you once again address me, and not the data. Address the data, please! Show me how this specific link contains inaccurate data to a substantial level and I will defer to your request. Lacking that, I still stand by the data all the while ignoring the package in which that data is contained (and you should too). If the data is accurate, the package matters not. If the data is INaccurate, the package still does not matter. What matters is the data. Why is this so hard?
According to you, if Connolly is involved the data is bad or at the very least suspect? And you say what I offered was a strawman (a sham argument set up to be defeated?). I checked the data, and I ask you once again (please address it directly and specifically) did you compare the two?
Once again, and to be clear, I offered zero commentary on the content but only offered the poster who requested information a place to start their search. In case it’s helpful, here’s a handy definition of citation: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/citation
You are not wasting your time. I followed the link you provided (via google just for the entertainment value) and it led me to (surprise!) a WUWT post which discussed Connolly’s inappropriate behavior. Having said that, please “educate” me as to how that 2009 post applies to the specific link I provided.
I’m open to reasonable refutation, but do not find it reasonable that because WUWT did a post almost 5 years ago about a single person impacts the validity of the data in the OP wiki. Address the data, not the person. Effectively that’s an ad hom.

@Danny Thomas – Oops! There go the goal posts again! You are deflecting. My discussion with you has NEVER mentioned the accuracy of the data, only the integrity of the source! You then sought to dismiss the criticism of the source by saying “looky what it says about WUWT”, which is totally irrelevant (even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while).
So after schooling you in at least presenting a reputable source, you are now demanding (not asking as you have yet to resolve the original challenge) that I prove to you that Wiki is a bad source! Which I already have several times (and tire of repeating myself).
Here’s a suggestion. If you want some scare crow to dance to your straw men and deflections, pay some idiot to do that for you. As I have seen no compensation coming from you, I will select my own subjects to discuss and my own issues to debate. And since I have only done that, I have not joined your scare crow club nor will I assist you in moving the goal posts once again.

Phil, Phil, Phil,
What goal posts did I move? I state again, (and again, and again), that the content of the wiki is good and it was provided as it contains links for supplemental information that the OP site does not offer. I apologize to you for this method as I should only provide the data that supports what you wish to have supported and not any other information which another might find informative.
You didn’t strike me as the guy who chooses to buy the Oreos brand due to the packaging. All I care about are the cookies inside. You have a problem with the wiki, and I do not. But I don’t arrive here with preconceptions especially based on a 5 year old post discussion Wm. Connolly and zero discussion about the wiki of topic.
Okay, you’ve devastated and destroyed my argument. Feel good about that do ya? The package is more important than the content according to you. Me, I care about the content and care not from where the information comes.
Please do point me to where you’ve detailed this specific wiki and how the content is inaccurate. Being the strawman player that I must be (as that’s the crown you’ve given to me) I’m totally incapable and missed it the first time (and the second, and third………….) that I asked you. Please provide the link! I’ll be waiting with baited (and probably bad) breath. Looking forward to it! Just so you don’t have to work too hard uncompensated by me, here’s the wiki link again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition
(crickets?)

@Danny Thomas – Oops! There go those goal posts again. Since you appear to have the memory of a goldfish, let me refresh your memory:

The evidence of the tampering of Wiki by Connolley is incontrovertible. So ALL data sourced from there must be viewed with a jaundiced eye. If you find the same information, at an untainted site, that merely shows that Connolley is not omnipotent. But Wiki cannot be used as a primary source. Period. Even beyond Connolley, any second grade teacher will tell you that.

Can you read that? How about this:

But just because it is on Wiki, does not make it false.

No big words there.
So I have to ask, why would you go to Wiki, which has an admitted bias and error rate, about the OISM when it is ONLINE? Why? Do you understand what a PRIMARY source is? Apparently not.
Let me help you – http://www.oism.org/pproject/
Primary source! Shazaam! Now you do not have to find it. Can you follow a link?

Phil,
You are absolutely and completely correct. I should use a primary source if I am citing. I wasn’t citing.
Here’s my perspective. If one asks for information about a topic, I can offer a finite source, or a broad source. I chose broad. There was one very simple reason. Links. So, yes, I can follow them and think that others can too. So why not make them available? I presume most folks here are reasonably capable. They can read, do their own research as far as they chose, and then make whatever determinations based on that research.
Phil, I just don’t care that WUWT has an issue with Connolly. If you provide me with a source about pretty much anything since you took your time to do so I feel it’s only right that I invest some time in looking at it. But if you tell me something, no matter how much I luv ya, I prefer to check the sources and information myself and I just work under the assumption that others do too. As I stated before, I could have listed 40 primary sources or one with links to the others. I chose, since I found good comparison, to go with the latter.
“The evidence of the tampering of Wiki by Connolley is incontrovertible. So ALL data sourced from there must be viewed with a jaundiced eye.” You see this as me providing some sort of citation. I did not. I provided a door thru which one could enter to seek that which they desired. I have no idea what wicked wanted, nor does it matter much. They asked for info. and I provided a “door”. And to go further, should not all data at all times be looked at “with a jaundiced eye” until some sort of confirmation occurs? Does this very site not look at EVERYTHING from the AGW side with a “jaundiced eye”? Should we not do the same with things from the “skeptic” side, or do we just accept those as valid as the come from the WUWT blog? (nope, not for me).
Not my words, but from another poster on another WUWT. Reg Nelson December 29, 2014 at 3:26 pm
Excellent point. Climate Scientists never seem to be concerned about the quality, quantity, accuracy or precision of the past data they spout as gospel — a telling sign that the data matters far less than their preconceived foregone conclusions.
From this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/29/a-few-comments-on-the-new-paper-by-gavin-schmidt-and-steven-sherwood/
I believe this applies quite well. To me, the data matters. I care not about yours or anyone elses preconceived forgone conclusions. Especially, if those that criticize me for this choice do not bother to check. That’s lazy. But if others chose to conduct themselves that way, I will still listen to them the next time and check what they say against other resources.
Based on what you’re presenting, if Wiley publishing puts out a book they edited, and within that book is found to be biased inaccurate content then every other publication of Wiley’s is invalid. That’s your choice if you like, but I chose otherwise.
Either way, as always I respect your view, if not your approach and I wish you all the best in the New Year and beyond.

Oops there go the goal posts again. Must be that gremlin that uses your account when you are sleeping.
Ah well, at least no one has to read your posts. Lying and deceit seem to be the only excuses you give. But not very well.

Phil,
Yep. Every word I said was a lie.
Suggested New Years Resolution for you is to learn how to read. Moving the words you already have in your mind out of the way so you could read mine must have worn you out so you stopped doing so. Either way I wish you the best for the New Year!

Sorry Danny, I know how to read, and that is your problem. You cite a source, and then deny you cited it. You claim that if one article is correct, the source must be correct on everything. You want us to believe that if you only lie once in a while, we should always believe you.
Yes, I know how to read. Your problem is you do not remember what you did, so you think you can fool everyone by denying what you do after a day or so.
Such dementia.

I was ready to let this go, but this:”You claim that if one article is correct, the source must be correct on everything.” Is not what I said. The words you have in your own mind you once again forgot to move and once again you thought your words were mine.

@Danny T:
DT says: So your link to a WUWT post on Connolly therefore makes the wiki on the OP as biased an inaccurate?
Read the very first hit. It ties together Wikipedia, Connolley, and anything global warming-related under the same umbrella: demonizing ‘carbon’, promoting windmills and other alternative energies, and howling about the Koch Brothers™.
It’s amusing when we observe some folks here being mind-controlled by the Narrative. Not naming names, of course…

Db,
I agree completely! “It’s amusing when we observe some folks being mind-controlled by the Narrative” when the narrative is that Connolly = bad = all wiki data = bad.
Now the fact that the data on the wiki matches the OP site must therefore mean the OP site data just has to be bad also. Now that would only be an assumption so would not one expect a critical thinker to check for themselves?
Db, straight up, did you check for yourself or are you being further controlled by the narrative, (although one shouldn’t name names, eh?)

33,000 is not a very large number.
..
There are 10,600,000 people in the USA qualified to sign the OISM petition.
..
33,000 signed it, and 10,567,000 did not
…
Barely 0.3%
..
Why have 99.7% not signed ??

D. Socrates is still going down his illogical road. You do not compare the population of a subset with everyone else in the world: you compare one subset with a competing subset. so compare the number of alarmist scientists with the number of scientific skeptics. Of course, if you do that skeptics win hands down. Socks knows that, so he prevaricates and dissembles.
I keep challenging these jamokes to produce their alarmist petition, to compare it with OISM. But they tuck tail and run, or they go off on completely illogical tangents like socks does here.
The fact is that the “consensus” is completely on the side of skeptics. But the relatively tiny alarmist clique cannot admit to the truth, so socks and chris emit their bogus arguments.
No wonder the alarmist crowd never debates skeptics any more. With fake arguments like socks makes, they would get slaughtered.

“so compare the number of alarmist scientists with the number of scientific skeptics. Of course, if you do that skeptics win hands down.”
Wait, I thought the argument was that the consensus doesn’t matter, and skeptic scientists are a persecuted minority in the scientific community? Now it’s that skeptic scientists dwarf scientists who accept AGW? How can that possibly be true, given that nearly every major scientific organization in the world endorses AGW theory? How can that be true when papers disputing AGW are almost never published in peer reviewed journals? How can that be true when Pew found that 84% of scientists say that the earth is warming due to human activity?http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/do-americans-know-where-scientists-stand-on-global-warming/
Where is this silent majority of scientists? Are they all in hiding? Certainly the Oregon Petition, which has no way of verifying the identities of every signatory, cannot itself be used as evidence that the consensus is on the skeptics’ side?
NOTE: None of this proves the existence or non-existence of AGW, I am just interested in debunking bad arguments.

Chris says:Where is this silent majority of scientists? Are they all in hiding? Certainly the Oregon Petition, which has no way of verifying the identities of every signatory
See what he’s doing? By [falsely] claiming that the OISM’s names cannot be vetted [wrong], he then extrapolates to every possible skeptical scientist, claiming they are ‘all in hiding’.
Rhetorical games like that are all these people have left. The plain facts are that the OISM petition has more than 31,000 co-signatures, all by professionals with degrees in the hard sciences, including more than 9,000 PhD’s. Every name has been vetted.
Those are the facts. So in order to hold the coveted [to them] title of “the consensus”, they must show their own named list of scientists who dispute the OISM’s statement that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere.
But they can’t produce a list with even one-tenth the number of OISM names.
So they disemble, and try to make a false comparison, between the number of OISM scientists, and the total number of scientists over all. But the real comparison is between OISM skeptics, and any list the alarmist clique can come up with.
So the “consensus” crown is solidly on the heads of climate skeptics. Not that they much care. “Consensus” is only really important to the alarmist cult. But they don’t get those bragging rights any more.

“See what he’s doing? By [falsely] claiming that the OISM’s names cannot be vetted [wrong], he then extrapolates to every possible skeptical scientist, claiming they are ‘all in hiding’.”
I made no such claim; your reading comprehension is not very good.
“Every name has been vetted.”
How? Defenders of the petition have had multiple opportunities here to explain the exact process by which the Oregon Institute vetted the identities of the signatories, and have utterly failed to do so. Please explain your assertion.
No one needs a similar petition to prove that the number of scientists who accept AGW theory are the majority. This has been proven by multiple polls and surveys, such as the Pew poll I already linked to. It’s proven by the fact that papers rejecting AGW are almost never published in peer review journals (note that I am NOT saying this proves AGW is true, I’m saying it proves that the majority of scientists accept it). It’s proven by the fact that nearly every single major scientific body in the world accepts the theory.
Please, go back to arguing that the consensus doesn’t matter and that the majority of scientists are part of an elaborate conspiracy–it’s much more convincing than this out of nowhere argument that skeptical scientists outnumber those who accept AGW, which is an argument even most of the people on your side do not actually believe.

Oh brother…ALARMISTS: “Climate Change is real and happening. Sceptics are deniers of Climate Change.”SCEPTICS: “We don’t deny that climate is changing yada yadaME: Can any of you point to ANY climatic region on this planet that has changed its characteristic in the last hundred years or so? A small change in temperature alone DOES NOT equate to climate change.
Desert climates of the 19th century are still desert climates. Tropical climates of….are still……..Polar climates….are still etc
Prominent sceptics keep playing this game by the alarmists rules. No wonder there’s no end in sight to this UN sponsored scam.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said his company “has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts. And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. We should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying.” — Even after IPCC toned down its earlier versions relating global warming and yet, some powerful people without understanding the basics of climate & climate change make statements. They must first understand the difference between global warming and climate change.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy

IPCC report says more than 50% [half] the global average temperature raise after 1951 was contributed by global warming. Here, they are not sure the exact percentage!!! Very recently American Academy of Sciences jointly with British Royal Meteorological Society published a report in which they presented a graph showing global temperature time series along with 10, 30 & 60 year moving average pattern. From the 60-year moving average pattern it is clear that after removing 60-year cyclic pattern that the trend showed less than 0.5 oC — 60-year cycle varies between -0.3 to +0.3 oC. That means global warming component is less than 0.25 oC from 1951 to date. However, here the 0.5 oC is an over estimation of global temperature raise as the urban heat-island effect is overemphasized with dense met network in urban areas and underemphasized the rural-cold-island effect with sparse met network. This is clearly evident from satellite data. That means global warming component [if it exists] far less than 0.25 oC and by 2100 it may reach less than 0.5 oC. Under this scenario, the impact of global warming will be negligible.
Unfortunately, we use climate change synonymous to global warming, which is not true. Climate change includes both the natural variations, which play prominent role in precipitation; and man induced variations in which ecological changes plays vital role. Global warming is one part of man induced variations. So far the component of global warming in global temperature raise is less than 0.25 oC. This will not have any impact on agriculture or health. Extremes in the climate parameters are part of natural variations. The precipitation cyclic variations do influence agriculture but they are different over different parts of the globe based on cyclic variation periods. There is no need to panic with global warming.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy

Camperdown Chronicle1903THE ENGLISH CLIMATE. IS IT CHANGING?
“In the face of the facts it seems hardly worth while to answer the question, Is the climate changing? Every one knows that we hardly ever have a real old-fashioned, snow-clad Christmas in these times that fires are often welcome on Midsummer Day, and that September— after the cricket season—often turns out to be the best month of the year…”
____________________The Brisbane Courier1903IS THE CLIMATE CHANGING?
“…..that the mean summer temperature at the Melbourne Observatory for the three years from 1859 to 1862 was 75.8, while for the last three years, from 1899 to 1902, the mean summer tempera-ture was 76.5—a difference of less than a degree….”
____________________Examiner (Launceston, Tas.)1906IS THE EARTH GETTING WARMER?
That the earth is growing temporarilly warmer is shown by the mountain gla-ciers….The latest report includes 90 glaciers in the Swiss Alps, in Norway, Greenland, the Caucasus, the Pamir, the North West United States, Western Canada. and Africa, and practically all are grow-ing smaller. In the Savoy Alps and the Pyrenees small glaciers have quite dis- appeared.
____________________Cairns Post1923TEMPERATE ARCTIC
“The discovery by American seal fishers that of late there has been a remarkable increase in the mean tem-perature of the Arctic, and that in some parts of the Polar basin no ice has been seen less than 9 degrees from the North Pole, agrees with the ex- perience of many Arctic explorers in recent years…”
____________________The Sydney Morning Herald1926CHANGING CLIMATE. AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. RECORDED FACTS
“Although the temperature year by year fluctuates widely from the average, there is an underlying upward trend in the northern United States and Canada like a slowly rising tide, while in the south of the United States the trend is the other way. Thus the con-trast between the weather of the north and south is diminishing, and the climate ot the country as a whole is ameliorating…”
____________________The Register News-Pictorial1930WARMER WORLD Weather Physicist Looks AheadThe world is growing warmer. Dr. J. W. Humphreys, physicist of the Weather Bureau,…..”There is evidence, however, that the world as a whole is very slowly growing warmer,” he said. “The evidence is that glaciers in all parts of the world have been on the average slowly retreating since the culmina- tion of the Ice Age, and they are still slowly retreating….”
____________________The Courier-Mail1934WORLD’S CHANGING CLIMATE Unsafe To Generalise
“The fact that during last year 81 of 100 Swiss glaciers decreased in size did not in any way indicate that the earth was becoming warmer and drier, said professor H. C. Richards, Pro- fessor of Geology at the Queensland University, yesterday, commenting on a message from Geneva concerning a world-wide drought. Even if the ob-servations of Swiss glaciers were con-tinued over a period of 50 years, he said, the data obtained could not warrant any general statement that the world as a whole was becoming drier or warmer…”
____________________Camperdown Chronicle1937THE WARM ARCTIC!
“We are usually inclined to regard the Arctic as a region where it is always cold. Actually, this is an erroneous belief. In the summer quite a large part of the continental Arctic has temperatures of 80 degrees F. in the shade”
____________________The Courier-Mail1939WORLD CLIMATE CHANGING Scientists Puzzled
“Scientists’ investigations show that the world’s climate is changing. But whether it is becoming wetter, warmer, drier, or colder they can’t say with certainty. Dr. F. W. Whitehouse, University geologist, said this yesterday in an ad- dress to the Constitutional Club…”
____________________Western Mail1941Impending Climatic Change
“The report was made by Halbert P. Gillette, of Chicago, to the association’s geology section….”Three of the long climatic cycles.” he reports, “have produced a downward trend in rainfall in many regions, cul-minating in a series of droughts begin-ning about 1920. This series of cycles probably will continue until about 1990. In many regions these droughts bid fair to be more severe than any long series in the last 20 centuries. It will therefore prove futile to continue the present policy of relief in the dustbowl regions. Wholesale migrations from these regions seems advisable.”…”
____________________The Canberra Times1951WEATHER REALLY IS CHANGING
“Sunspot activity indicates that the world will have generally cooler summers and colder win-ters during the next 15 years, according to a forecast based on the study of sunspot cycles go- ing back to 1790. Dr. H. C. Willett, meteorolo-gist at the Massachusetts Insti-tue of Technology, said to-day that official records of sunspot activity linked their activity with weather conditions in all parts of the world….”

For another example, Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, wrote for January 1660/61-the year the Royal Society was established “It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all; but the ways are dusty, and the flyes fly up and down, and the rose-bushes are full of leaves, such a time of the year as was never known in this world before here.”http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1661/01/21/
…and before that, John King, an Elizabethan preacher from Britain wrote in 1595; “Our years are turned upside down; our summers are no summers; our harvests are no harvests!” http://www.thegwpf.com/the-global-little-ice-age/

That well known “climate scientist” Al Gore is listed as a senior adviser to Google. I’ll guess he doesn’t consider that a reason to talk about old people. He does not have a degree in anything close to science or climate. He, and friends, are getting a bit past middle age, though. In fact the senior members of the club of “climate science” do not have degrees called that. That is not a long established degree program. They became “climate scientists” by working on related things and then calling it climate science. One can still do that, so what is the big deal?
Folks such as Eric Schmidt, Tom Steyer, Barack Obama, Jay Inslee, and fellow travelers are not scientists. They have political agendas. This is not about the scientific qualifications of people – it is more like a cult. There are different reasons people join this cult but understanding the dynamic Earth is not one of them.

Chris, thank you for debunking Mann’s hockey stick.
You see, Mann knew very little about dendrochronology or statistics and was certainly not in any way trained in either.
But the hockey stick paper was based entirely on those two branches.
Under your reasoning, that the Global Warming Petition Project was only a small number of Climatologists, then Mann’s work can be totally discounted… as it has been by real dendrochronologists and statisticians
Also, there are actually very few of your priests that are climatologists either..
…so the whole AGW meme can also be discounted.
Seriously though, only a childish brain-washed fool would think that fields such as ……..
1. Atmosphere (total 579)
I) Atmospheric Science (112)
II) Climatology (39)
III) Meteorology (343)
IV) Astronomy (59)
V) Astrophysics (26)
2. Earth (total 2,240)
I) Earth Science (94)
II) Geochemistry (63)
III) Geology (1,684)
IV) Geophysics (341)
V) Geoscience (36)
VI) Hydrology (22)
3. Environment (total 986)
I) Environmental Engineering (487)
II) Environmental Science (253)
III) Forestry (163)
IV) Oceanography (83)
etc etc etc
add to that General Engineering 10,000+
(see here: http://www.petitionproject.org/qualifications_of_signers.php )
would not have a very good idea of the way SCIENCE and the Earth functions …
but then.. you is you, a brain-washed propagandist. !
Sorry, but the Global Warming Petition Project represents far more REAL scientists than the IPCC or any part of the climate change agenda.
Most of the climate change mouth pieces seem to be sociologist , or journalists or some other branch of NON-science.

But Andy, Db says the info. is inaccurate or unusable. As it matches quite well with the wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition) and since all wiki’s are invalid as proven by the link Db offered to a WUWT post that Connolly is biased therefore all wiki’s are biased so the information contained in a wiki must be considered invalid. Too bad, since the info. from the OP site matches your offering. But unfortunately the Db methodology must be followed so you’ll have to try again. Sorry.
The Oregon Petition Project clarified their verification process as follows:
The petitioners could submit responses only by physical mail, not electronic mail, to limit fraud. Older signatures submitted via the web were not removed. The verification of the scientists was listed at 95%,[14] but the means by which this verification was done was not specified.
Signatories to the petition were requested to list an academic degree.[15] The petition sponsors stated that approximately two thirds held higher degrees.[14] As of 2013, the petition’s website states, “The current list of 31,487 petition signers includes 9,029 PhD; 7,157 MS; 2,586 MD and DVM; and 12,715 BS or equivalent academic degrees. Most of the MD and DVM signers also have underlying degrees in basic science.”[16]
Petitioners were also requested to list their academic discipline. As of 2007, about 2,400 people in addition to the original 17,100 signatories were “trained in fields other than science or whose field of specialization was not specified on their returned petition.”[14] The petition sponsors state the following numbers of individuals from each discipline:[16]
Atmospheric, Environmental and Earth sciences: 3,805 (Climatology: 39)
Computer and Mathematical sciences: 935
Physics & Aerospace sciences: 5,812
Biochemistry, Biology, and Agriculture: 2,965
Medicine: 3,046
Engineering and General Science: 10,102
Db will offer to hold your hand should you desire.

Why did Eric say it now? Might be that Google needs political support in its businesses. Self-driving cars are a dead end without changes in regulations. Governments might attact Google with anti-trust cases. Remember what happened to Microsoft.
Situation with oil is interesting. Shale oil looked promising but can it survive the price war with
Russians and OPEC. USA is not fast enough in nuclear either. The 2nd cold war with Russia should not take too long.

Global cooling December 27, 2014 at 1:12 am Self-driving cars are a dead end without changes in regulations.
As several airline crashes have been shown to be caused by increased automation which t
he crew either did not know when to turn off or could not turn it off at all, it’s going to be a long long time before self-drive cars will be allowed out to play I think. Humans many be bad but there is nothing so deadly as malfunctioning automation, especially when you have had no training to know what is broken and how to disable it and drive yourself.

It is truly disturbing that Mr. Schmidt could make a statement so thoroughly flawed in its basic premise. He runs a multi-billion dollar company that uses vast quantities of electricity to disseminate information throughout the world. Perhaps he should speak out on issues he actually understands.

Well, being head of Google would mean that what he really understands is spying on people and working with the CIA and NSA. If he could do so, I bet he would spy on the private life of Mother Nature herself.

Gareth Philips,
If you knew anything at all about WordPress, which hosts this site, you would know that WUWT has no control over the ads placed here. This matter has been discussed in these pages, before. In your zeal to sully this site, you have once again demonstrated your willingness to sling arrows drawn from your quiver of ignorance.

Thank you Alan and Bruce for your civil and insightful responses in keeping with the season of goodwill. Regardless of where the advertisement originated, it’s qualities remain the same. However I acknowledge that I did not have the technical know how to realise the advertisements were beyond Anthony’s control and placed there by a third party. In some ways, that makes it even more sad. Even sadder than people incapable of discussion without immediately resorting to ad hominem tactics. Nadolig Llawen to you both.

Gareth,
One downside of commenting is that politeness suffers. I think others were just reacting to perceived criticism of this site. FYI, I didn’t take it that way when I read your original comment. [Not that I am innocent of reacting in similar ways on occasion.]

Gareth,
Your response is as disingenuous as your initial post. You have never evinced any concern for “the reputation of this site”, other than to try to disparage what is said here. In your response, you up the ante and make even more disparaging comments about WUWT, continuing your attack. You then pretend that the response to your long history of trolling behavior and attacks against WUWT are unwarranted, or in some way, hurtful to meaningful dialogue, or to you, personally.
Your subtle attacks are all too familiar to the readership and your pretense of innocence is not only obvious, but ludicrous.
Harry Truman said it best: “If you don’t like the heat, stay out of the kitchen”.

Here you see fascism in action. While the state does not own the industrial enterprise, it does direct it, whether by fiat or by the willing cooperation of the chairman of the company. The industrial enterprise cooperates explicitly with the state in achieving the state’s political objectives irrespective of the cost to shareholders.
Propaganda by any other name is still propaganda. If this is the official opinion of Google, then I recommend switching search engines, as they no doubt skew their results to match the company’s political ideology.
Also, ditch your Android devices.

“Here you see fascism in action.”
Agreed. Fascism also goes by the name “corporatism” (Mussolini’s term) and by the name “crony-capitalism”. The problem with “fascism” is that it has so much baggage from WWII.
In any case, American corporations know that incentives, rules, legislation, and so forth can be a “good thing” or a very, very bad thing depending on if they keep their masters happy or not.

That’s why I chose the term — precisely because of the baggage. We should not put a happy-face on this type of tyranny by giving it some anodyne moniker.
It’s human nature that people will seek power and wealth, and the more ruthless tend to try to push their way to the apex. That’s fine, but let’s not make the apex our government. I’d rather be seen as a source of revenue by someone who can’t throw me in jail or legally execute me than by someone who can. Government should be limited in scope and extent by any means necessary because of the natural tendency to form symbiotic relationships with industry — relationships that are all about furthering the wealth and power of those with their hands on the controls, and that have little to do with the well-being of those of us who toil daily to pay for it.

They certainly do skew results.
For those of us that were here for Climategate…it rose very rapidly in “hits” for the first 48hrs or so…and then suddenly nothing. Like the counters got reset.
I lean more towards duckduckgo.com for a search engine.
However, Schmidt could really care less if you use his search engine or not. He is also more than capable of understanding the science of alarmism, or the lack thereof.
What he DOES understand is that supporting it appeals to his customers in terms of image, and it strengthens his relationship with POTUS.

Eric Schmidt and his paid attack-dog trolls like chris are of course the liars. The Big Money is on the side of Alarmists, so the psychological projection runs rampant. Additionally, and as usual, they use their tried-and-true logical fallacy-laden tactics of ad hominem, smear, and their two favorites; the Appeal to Authority and the Appeal to Consensus.

Hans,
The link I gave you goes to the transcript of the remarks made by Eric Schmidt during his conversation with Diane Rehm, which is the topic of this thread- not to an advertisement.
I thought that when you asked “What tells us Google press release?”- that you wanted to know the source of Mr. Schmidt’s remarks.
We have a bit of language barrier, n’est ce pas?
Please pardon my misunderstanding.

This is the money line that Chris has kept folks from thinking about: ” From our perspective, perpetuating poverty, misery, disease and premature death in poor African and Asian countries – in the name or preventing climate change – is evil.”
Google and folks that want to drive up the cost of energy, harm innocents and keep the impoverished is just that.
Can Chris find fault with the quoted sentence? Does he support keeping the poor poor?

I’m a firm believer in Climate Change, and can’t be called a denier. The blogosphere includes numerous comments I’ve written, and they tend to be very supportive of Climate Change. Today the temperature at lunch was 16 degrees C, and this is close to the optimum. What I need is for everybody to work hard to allow the temperature to increase a little bit more, and then you can keep it steady. I also wish for rain to fall only at night, an end to football player injuries, and some sort of indoor dog toilet.

Chris – I don’t often scroll through, but have found your posts of great interest. Firstly, acknowledgement for WUWT for not censoring the debate. Secondly, to yourself for remaining persistent and factual. I hope you are still there! I am an ecologist – fully qualified in environmental sciences, with over thirty years experience of advisory work at many levels -from NGOs to government, the EU and the UN. My work has been to analyse the science upon which policy or policy proposals are based. I have reviewed many a computer model that attempts to predict consequences of pollutants. I have helped draft UN legislation, and one of my long-term colleagues (Prof Jackson Davis, Environmental Studies Institute, Boulder, Co) helped to draft the Kyoto Protocol.
As a consultant I have to know about climate science – but apart from a review for a British government agency in 1996, in which I advised that regional models and projections were very simplistic and unreliable, I accepted what I thought was the ‘basic science’ – as did all of my colleagues. But after reviewing government energy policy in 2001 – following the report of the UK Royal Commission on Climate Change, and taking a look at the environmental impact of the renewable strategies there proposed (the UK government funded my group to look at integration strategies) – in my view, there would be quite devastating impacts on rural life, landscape, community and biodiversity, I then spent three years at my own expense reviewing all the major fields of climate science – meteorology, atmospheric physics, oceanography, paleo-climates, glaciers and ice-caps, solar-terrestrial physics….and of course, computer models.
I wrote a long report which I circulated to my former colleagues and ‘allies’ in the environmental movement – basically concluding that the majority of the warming was clearly natural in origin. And that there was in fact no clear consensus in the scientific working groups of the IPCC – this was a myth propounded by the secretariat that delivered the ‘summary for policy makers’. Not one of my former allies (in the ‘green’ movement) would enter debate. Only after a small publishing house turned my report into a book – which got some coverage in the UK, did the ‘greens’ respond – with vilification. Not a single request from them to discuss the implications of the critical review. Instead, I was invited by politicians and bankers – all very convivial, but not my natural allies.
I am afraid you may suffer from the same block. As a non-scientist you cannot believe that all of the worlds science academies could be so wrong, and you have an abiding faith in the UN – as well as perhaps governments. I have real life experience of just how wrong science can go – like when the same type of false consensus was constructed over the effects (non-effects) of low level radiation. Only one scientists stood against that consensus – at first – Dr Alice Stewart of Birmingham University’s epidemiology department. Only she bothered to collate data on women x-rayed during pregnancy. She was villified. It took her more than 10 years to get her work accepted – in fact, an American epidemiologist, chair of the US BEIR committee, EP Radford, took up her cause after working on Swedish miners exposed to radon. She died at 95, without honours. One of her main scientific opponents was knighted by the Queen of England (I think she is the only one doing that stuff these days!).
So – you see, whatever the truth about Heartland Institute funding, or the Oregon petition, there are other much more apposite examples – and I have laid them out in my book ‘Chill’ which no ‘green’ will read, let alone review. And by the way, because I am clearly one of the hated environmentalists (I helped develop the Precautionary Principle) – WUWT has never publicised the fact that there exists a critique of alarmism by someone within the green movement. Do read it, if you want a detailed expose of the science – and write to me if you want a follow up (it was published in 2009, and is readily available used for a few dollars on Amazon!). Since then there have been many more papers published and I can readily substantiate a 75% value for the natural component of warming. Thus halving emissions deals with 12.5% of the driving force – and will not affect what the climate does. Science still has little idea of precisely what drives the natural cycles – but many studies point toward imminent cooling. The issue should be settled over the next five year period. If the alarmists are right, the global average should stay pretty much the same as CO2 counters the natural cooling cycle, and if the sceptics are right, the temperature will fall and a cooling trend since 2001 will become evident. There is then a real danger that the next solar cycle will mirror the Maunder Minimum with incalculable consequences for northern Europe, the US, China, Russia and Japan. That is why I have argued for a switch from ineffective mitigation to adaptation and resilience.

For your further information, and another reason to stop supporting Google in any way, the company is a major contributor to anti-hydraulic fracturing activist groups (fractivitists). So they are working both sides of the street on this one: trying to use their huge audience to propel their mis-informed message about the alleged eco-damage caused by fossil fuels, and providing money to stop any further development of fossil fuels.

Ever wonder why Google won’t release actual metering stats on its data centers? Part of my former job modeling distribution/transmission networks included dialing into SEL-735 devices that metered one of their facilities. They used more energy than southern cities/towns of 50k people. Eric Schmidt loves using the slight of hand for distraction, hoping we don’t realize the massive energy hogs Google is building and leasing.
I wish an interviewer (Charlie Rose? nah…) would ask him some tough questions: why data centers in the south, where ambient temperatures require far more energy use for AC? Why not build in Montana or Minnesota, next to the actual wind farms that you purchase credits from? Why buy renewable energy from wind farms that are not even on the same AC grid as the data centers you claim to be offsetting? Why won’t you be upfront with the number of facilities the company owns/rents and how about releasing some measured metering data? [Oh yea, Schmidt is secretive about it due to ‘competitive advantage’? Who is literally lying now, Schmidt?]
Don’t buy into the data center industry’s ruse either, using misleading stats like aggregate critical load (Dupont Fabros), IT load factor (Digital Realty), Google’s favorite Power Usage Effectiveness ratio, and Apple had some new, unique BS one for its North Carolina facility. Just give the public metered data at the point of utility interconnection for the month of August. Provide the amount of fuel your backup generators burned thru in their monthly redundancy tests while you’re at it. Eric won’t because he loves this schtick he’s selling. Data centers are a PR nightmare and they are crucial to “green tech”.

I think that the most efficient data center I’ve been in was at Syracuse Univ.
It was co-sponsored by IBM and a state agency.
They installed micro turbines fed by nat gas to power the data center (as well as a huge number of dorm buildings. Rather than cool the whole data center, they used radiator doors on all of the equipment cabs, so cooling was all local to the air in the rack, rather than cooling probably 100X more airspace to cool the entire datacenter.
But even with all that…you’ll note that OTHER businesses aren’t doing that. Why? Because it’s not a huge PR win for some tech company and the state.
In other words, it doesn’t make economic sense.
As for northern data centers, I’ve never understood why temps weren’t managed at least PART time, during the winter, by just blowing cold air through filters to drop the temps, instead of running huge chillers/AC units that are incredibly inefficient anyway. I worked in a lot of Digital Equipment’s datacenters throughout the northeast during the 80’s…and never understood why they didn’t just use outside air.

I’m not a mechanical engineer, but cooling these facilities seems like an interesting problem. I toured one before the downturn in 2007 and the difference between a cool aisle and a hot one was insane. It has been estimated that their North Carolina center has 417,600 servers alone (it was not the one I had firsthand data for). I could estimate its load by the lines feeding it (knowing there is a redundant source), but this appears to be an underground feeder(s). I just wish an ex employee would release their metering data/bill, akin to what happened to Al Gore a few years back.
Thing is, I wouldn’t fault them for these facilities if it weren’t for the fact their idiot ex-CEO has this gimmick the average American is to busy to see thru. I wonder if he knows that he’s a huge hypocrite or maybe he’s just that ignorant. He saw the huge expense, but he just thought that was just the way search engine business worked. Page and Serge took a page out of the Steve Jobs book: when it earned a D for its impact to the environment, first thing Apple did was put Al Gore on the board. Problem solved….

I would say the fact that there has been some change in climate isn’t disputed. Climate is constantly changing. The notion that the change is due to human activity is speculative, though. Yes, we can cause changes at the local scale due to land use changes but I’m unconvinced of any global scale changes due to humans.
Example: Measure the height of 100 people in a room and arrive at the average. Now place 5 of those people in elevator shoes and repeat. Yes, the average height went up but people are not generally growing taller. 5 of the people were changed locally and that impacted the average but the rest experienced no change at all.

“Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren”

Schmidt can’t be a complete idiot being the chairman of Google, so it is troubling he feels it necessary to make such an idiotic statement. Everyone knows the climate is changing and apparently people are opposing it? Is this supposed to make sense? Unless we stop the climate from changing we are hurting generations of children?
Just as obvious as the climate is changing and has always changed, Schmidt is carrying water for political reasons in exchange for monetary and other favors from the government enhancing his investments. The guy is not an idiot but cannot be more transparent.

“People who oppose [climate change] are really hurting our children and grandchildren.”
I embrace climate change, which I recognize as a natural phenomenon; I don’t oppose it in the least. I think Mr. Schmidt does, however, and I believe that he is correct about hurting our children and grandchildren. I don’t think he’s worried at all about his. “Bugger thy neighbor” says Schmidt.

Some climate change we are having,
“Bumper harvests and abundant stockpiles are key factors helping drive down international cereal prices, according to the report released on Thursday.
World wheat production in 2014 is forecast to reach a new record, it says.
For coarse grains, prospects for near-record production levels, combined with already-high inventories point to a very comfortable world supply and demand balance in 2014/15, especially for maize.
While rice outputs could decline slightly this year, stockpiles remain “huge” and are sufficient to cover over one-third of projected consumption during the 2015-16 period.
All told, world cereal production in 2014 is anticipated to reach 2.523 million tons (2.5bn tons) — an upward revision of 65 million tons from FAO’s initial forecast in May. World cereal stocks should hit their highest level in 15 years by the end of the cropping season in 2015”

Follow the money. The disastrous Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is partially owned by Google. Incinerating birds, not working up to expectations, and seeking a taxpayer bailout. But leave it to Google to keep pushing a failed green agenda. Do no evil???

Climate change,good or bad is not really as important as the fact that we have to quit polluting and plundering the earth. It can only take so much. Renewable energy is absolutely necessary at some point or we do ourselves in. All the money spent arguing climate change would be much better spent funding clean energy.

“And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore.”
It is unfortunate when people like Mr Schmidt speak up about climate change caused by global warming , they fail to check what is happening to the climate in their own land. Where is the global warming that caused all this climate change ?
“They’re just literally lying.” I wonder who is lying to who, Mr Schmidt.. There is no global warming in United States.
CONTIGUOUS US TEMPERATURE TRENDS 1998-2014 [17 YEARS]
PER NCDC/NOAA CLIMATE AT A GLANCE WEB PAGE
WINTER -1.79 F/DECADE
6 MONTHS (SEPT-FEB) -0.98 F/DECADE
9MONTHS (SEPT-MAY) -0.67 F/DECADE
FALL -0.49 F/DECADE
SPRING -0.06 F/DECADE
SUMMER + 0.23 F/DECADE
ANNUAL -0.36 F/DECADE
ILLINOIS WINTER -3.3 F/DECADE
ILLINOIS FEB -6.6 F/DECADE

Paul Driessen and Chris Gates:
“… this statement presents a stunning failure in applying Aristotelian logic. …..This kind of reasoning (the scientific method) has served progress and civilization well since the Seventeenth Century.”
The authors are right to point out the logical inadequacies of the statement they criticise but they are wrong to persist in the myth that modern science began in the seventeenth century. Adelard of Bath, Thierry of Chartres, Robert Grosseteste, William of Auvergne, Albert Magnus, Roger Bacon, Etienne Tempier and Jean Buridan all lived well before the seventeenth century. In fact they were all alive during the “terrible” Middle Ages.
As to Aristotle, his scientific ideas were based on pantheism and so, for example, he asserted that if two bodies were dropped from the same height at the same time, the one with twice the weight of the other one would fall twice as fast because it had twice the nature and twice the desire to do so. (On the Heavens, Book 1, Part 6, third paragraph.)
It took many centuries for Aristotle’s’ scientific notions to be rejected and when they were rejected it was due to the rejection of pantheism by those who believed in a Creator who was separate from His creation, not part of it. The people who believed that were, of course, Christians.
And, by the way, Nigel S, Galileo was never tortured and anybody who has studied modern literature on the Inquisition knows that torture was rarely used by the Inquisition. the idea of the Inquisition making widespread use of torture was put about by two groups of people: Protestants in general because they disliked the Catholic Church, and people, mainly Dutch, who were anti-Spanish. It is a pity that so many people are still misled by the falsehoods of the Black Legend.

The idea that action on climate change will harm poor countries is disingenuous. The Kyoto Protocol doesn’t apply to underdeveloped countries, and almost everyone agrees that the burden of reducing CO2 should fall primarily on wealthy nations who are the primary drivers of climate change.

Don’t let the facts hit you in the head. Low and middle income countries account for around 50% of oxygen (CO2) emissions, meaning wealthy nations can’t be the “primary” drivers. China, for example, is nearly double the U.S., and is growing at almost 10% per year, while the U.S. and Europe are shrinking.
But you did say “climate change” not CO2. So how do you conjecture that this “climate change” is being “driven”? I thought that the agitprop orthodoxy was that is was via CO2, which would falsify your claim that it is primarily “wealthy” nations “driving climate change”, would it not?

Your statement is beyond disingenuous. Since Kyoto, the idea that poor nations must forgo the use of cheap fossil fuels to build their energy infrastructures is de rigueur among totalitarian greens. Almost no one agrees that the people of any nation should be burdened with costly CO2 reduction schemes- no one except those who would usurp power and wealth via forced adaptation of green measures, that is- and their willing propagandists.

“Your statement is beyond disingenuous. Since Kyoto, the idea that poor nations must forgo the use of cheap fossil fuels to build their energy infrastructures is de rigueur among totalitarian greens.”
Can you name them? I’m genuinely curious as to what you are talking about.

I Googled and found this statement from James Hansen:
“The second scenario, labeled Coal Phase-out, is meant to approximate a situation in which developed countries freeze their CO2 emissions from coal by 2012 and a decade later developing countries similarly halt increases in coal emissions. Between 2025 and 2050 it is assumed that both developed and developing countries will linearly phase out emissions of CO2 from coal usage. Thus in Coal Phase-out we have global CO2 emissions from coal increasing 2% per year until 2012, 1% per year growth of coal emissions between 2013 and 2022, flat coal emissions for 2023–2025, and finally a linear decrease to zero CO2 emissions from coal in 2050. These rates refer to emissions to the atmosphere and do not constrain consumption of coal, provided the CO2 is captured and sequestered. Oil and gas emissions are assumed to be the same as in the BAU [Business as Usual] scenario.”
Again, who are the “totalitarian greens” arguing that poor nations need to immediately cease the use of cheap fossil fuels? It seems like what people are arguing is that wealthy nations should take the lead in decreasing coal emissions, and poorer nations should follow down the line. Keep in mind these targets are almost never hit–the U.S. is continuing to spend far more on fossil fuels than climate aid–so the “alarmism” would seem to be coming from those who claim that protecting the environment will be the death of business and free enterprise, as they have always claimed.

Chris: The main obstacle in the way of poor countries electrifying is occurring behind the scenes. They find it very hard to get loans from the World Bank or from foreign aid from rich countries to build non-sustainable power plants. South Africa is involved in a recent fruitless struggle to do so. I imagine that also applies to projects that would increase consumption of petroleum, even indirectly.

Chris, there is no climate change. Have you missed the fact that for the last 18 years there has been no warming whatsoever? Do you know that the greenhouse theory of IPCC has been forecasting warming for every one of these 18 years and getting nothing? Do you know that in science a theory that predicts impossible things is considered invalid and must be discarded? Do you understand that 18 wrong predictions in a row is enough to prove that it belongs in the waste basket of history? Simply because it does not obey the laws of nature. An alternative greenhouse theory that does obey the laws of nature is called the Miskolczi greenhouse theory. It predicts what we see: addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, contrary to what you have been told, does not warm the world. That takes care of the alleged greenhouse warming that IPCC has been babbling about.. With that, anthropogenic global warming or AGW is proven to be non-existent. It is nothing more than a pseudo-scientific fantasy, cooked up by over-eager climate workers to justify their greenhouse hypothesis which has turned out to be false. But based on this falsehood, we are subjected to irrational laws of emission control and other worthless and very expensive efforts to stop a non-existent global warming.

“Have you missed the fact that for the last 18 years there has been no warming whatsoever?”
That’s not entirely true. 2005 and 2010 were both hotter than 1998, which was an unusually hot year. It’s true that most years since have seen relatively flat temperatures, but that doesn’t change the fact that 14 of the past 15 years have been among the warmest on record.

Chris said, “2005 and 2010 were both hotter than 1998, which was an unusually hot year. It’s true that most years since have seen relatively flat temperatures, but that doesn’t change the fact that 14 of the past 15 years have been among the warmest on record.”
The upslope in warming since 1998 and 2003 is much flatter than what was predicted. If warmist scientists and others in their camp had been asked, back then, to give odds on such a flattish slope, they’d likely have given 50-to1 against. That implies there’s something wrong with their understanding of how the climate system works.
Every year that the divergence grows–and it will grow even if 2014 is the warmest year yet (by a tiny amount)–their claim that they understand the basics of what’s going on will become less credible.

#1 Kyoto is dead. That is a non sequitur.
#2 Energy is a global commodity. The price is not set by country, and the market does not discriminate between rich and poor ones, so when you increase the cost, you impoverish the poor more (who can afford it the least). So yes it does.

The idea that the concerted efforts of the human population can affect the weather has never been proven.
It never will, cus we’re a bunch of murderous bastards only looking after our own well being.
Sometimes we slip, and get sentimental though.

First I apologize, my original post was snotty, and I was wrong on 2 points; I see that the fake names I cited are no longer on the list, as I probably should have expected. I also did not know that sociology wouldn’t qualify. Nevertheless, while everyone is entitled to an opinion, most hard science degrees are still insufficient qualification to contribute to climate change policy. It seems an obvious point, but you wouldn’t ask even the most brilliant electronic engineer how to best treat treat a cancer. On top of this is the verifiability problem.
Another important point is that this petition is old. It is unfair to claim 31000 among your ranks when over the past 15 years many have changed their minds.

Yes, but you would ask a statistician about the validity of your statistical methods regardless of the field of study in which you applied those methods, right?
And what would you say about “science” that was based on poor (or downright invalid) statistical methods? Would a qualified statistician who said that a “climate” paper was invalid because the statistical methods used don’t support its conclusions be qualified to contribute to “climate change policy”?

James, your suggestion that many of the original 31,000 signatories may have changed their minds would likely be more than balanced by even more scientists in recent times who would be eager to sign an updated petition, since extraordinarily much more information has come to light in the intervening years, which debunks the original climate fear screeds. By the way, have you ever seen the “climate science” pedigrees of those who have been the loudest voices proclaiming climate doom? You might avail yourself of such easy to find information…

Keep taking an honest look at the facts.
Someone with a hard science degree should know how to tell if whatever the topic is has been handled in an honest scientific manner.
As has been pointed out, many of the “names” espousing CAGW and/or AGW don’t have degrees in the field either. (Just how long have degrees in “Climate Science” been offered anyway?)
As far as the petition being “old”, it’s not as old as Hansen’s testimony that day when the AC was sabotaged and definitely not old as Mann’s tree-ring circus. And the petition flew in the face of the claims at the time that practically all scientist, the “consensus” before it had a number, agreed that the CAGW science was settled.

How true, I recommend you read the CRU emails to see how “Real Qualified” climatologists behave.
Ever enjoyed any Gilbert &Sullivan performances?
What does sociology have to do with science? Apart from your statement that everyone is entitled to an opinion..?
And what does your obsession with petitions have to do with the words of the head of Google?
Was there some relevancy hidden here that escaped my attention?

Then why is Google building their data centers in the south where you’d have to pump the AC 10 months out of the year BEFORE thousands of servers heat up the facility’s interior? Why isn’t Schmidt building data centers in Minnesota or Idaho or Montana, right next to the wind farms that he’s purchasing green credits from? Don’t you think putting money where Schmidt’s mouth is would cut back HVAC costs even more, returning your ‘big bucks’? Why put your data centers on a separate AC grid from the wind farms, Ironargonaut?
What’s stupid is Schmidt spouting off his environmentalist Schtick while burdening the electric infrastructure in the south with his energy hogs. And what’s even more stupid is a guy falling for his gimmick and defending these idiotic, hypocritical policies.

One of the key problems is that people who are rich and successful in certain fields feel they are qualified to provide judgement on everything else and should be listened to. Perhaps the author and his colleagues could book an appointment with Mr Schmidt to give him a free briefing. Mr Schmidt could have his “experts” on hand to ask questions and refute statements. I would pay to see that.

Schmidt has probably been given private presentations by a few climatologists, plus one-sided warmist material to read and view online–including purported refutations of skeptical claims. I suspect this is what happened to the big-name Republicans who have joined or founded the Risky Business agitation group. We know that’s how Gore got converted–and stays converted. He regularly consults with “scientists I trust” to get the real deal on what’s happening.
A challenge to read a selected list of the best Contrarian articles and books should be made to them They should all be asked, at any public presentations they give, what skeptical literature they’ve read.

Dwight Eisenhower was right about the threat posed by a scientific elite! And Google certainly is part of today’s scientific elite … being in a dominant position to influence not just the US but the world, with a campaign of disinformation disguised as fact. The Nazis and the Communists would be envious of Google… that it has achieved that which they could not achieve … being in a position to so readily influence the global masses without accountability.

Can we get together and put in a formal complaint to Google and demand an apology for the insult to our intelligence compared to his blatant ignorance and blind faith in climate science? To be proven beyond question at the very least the question that needs an answer yes is “were your predictions perfect and 100% accurate for the entire duration since you first claimed the theory”.
A powerful brainwashing facility like Google has to be held seriously to account for accuracy.

A great idea, but it should not be in the form of a complaint. He has his own views with which 99 per cent of blogs on this subject rightly disagree. Lets just make sure that the facts are placed in his hands and courteously invite him to reply. Perhaps we should send him a printout of all our blogs on this subject to provide him with a little late night reading, although I am sure his attention has been brought to this site, and who knows, he may have read everyone’s blogs so far!

As in all things you must understand why CO2 presents a problem above or under certain amounts. It is the heat gain to loss balance of the planet. We currently have a very warm blanket with the sun out. At first we only feel slightly warmer, but as heat can no longer escape fast enough we start continually getting warmer. We currently have more CO2 in the atmosphere than there has been at any point during mammals existance. Without sequestering and eliminating green house gasses we must rely on clouds to reflect heat. It is good water evaporates off the ocean faster at higher temperatures to aid in this. That means we must live with the mega storms going on below the cloud layer and hope for lots of snowfall to change the albido of the planet to reflect the heat (ice age). Or we can stop producing greenhouse gasses faster than natural processes (plants) can take it back out. So no we do not know what will happen now CO2 has passed 350 ppm, but do any of you like any of these outcomes? How about the tax payer cost to sequester the carbon that is currently subsidized to be burned?

It seems inconceivable that intelligent people with all the resources to research data have become so convinced of ’Climate Change’. The term itself is a marketing/PR brainchild and quite meaningless.
Perhaps, being in the upper echelon, they mix with those at the top that created this political absurdity and so get their information from cocktail parties and ‘group think’ conferences.

Ron,
In English, the word “was” indicates the past tense. I never made any claims about whether those names are still there currently. The group behind the petition acknowledged that those and other fake names did appear, and have since scrubbed them. You can easily discover this yourself with a quick Google–er, Bing– search. They claim to now have a verification process in place, but since they haven’t revealed what that process entails, there is no way to know for sure.
I accept your apology in advance.

Not in your dreams buster! You wrote:

“No, they haven’t, and no, it isn’t. You didn’t address that even of the 30,000 which includes obvious fake names…”

Note the present tense. And 31,487 is the current number, not the number before weeding out problematic entries. Also would you mind explaining to us why no one with the surname “Darwin” can give a child the first name “Charles” any more? After all, that would be necessary if this were to be an “obvious” fake name.
But beyond the fact that technically and strictly, you have convicted yourself as a liar, what about the wider issue that when one writes, one should be fair to one’s opponents? Why are you trying to create in the minds of less informed readers the fallacious idea that this absolutely sound petition is a load of fakery? Do you actually believe in global warming catastrophism? Or are you pushing for some ulterior motive such as a political belief? Who knows, all we actually know is you are a liar.
I leave to one side your utter cluelessness about science when you write “only less than a percent had a background in climate science, which makes the petition utterly meaningless” because your dishonesty makes you a person not entitled to be taken seriously. (But hmmm, your dishonesty makes it much more likely that you know full well that that one is a load of crock, but you say it once again for its effect on the less well informed. You (anonymous as are most cowards) are one piece of work.)

OK, I guess I did use the present tense at one point, prior to realizing that those names had been removed from the petition. It was a mistake, not an intentional lie.
“But beyond the fact that technically and strictly, you have convicted yourself as a liar, what about the wider issue that when one writes, one should be fair to one’s opponents?”
It’s really funny that you didn’t see the irony in this sentence before you hit submit.

Chris: “Why would you tell such an obvious lie?” (that coal receives no subsidies)
It is not a lie! A reduction of tax is simply NOT a “subsidy”! Many people take the the standard IRS 1040 deduction (~$12,000?) every year which reduces their tax by a couple thousand dollars. So, despite people each sending the IRS several thousand dollars do you consider those who take that deduction to be “subsidized” by the federal government? Do you believe in unicorns?
Here’s a mind test for you Chris – imagine an earth world without fossil fuel and describe how world history would have gone since about the late 18th century?
The one material that has been and still is the greatest benefit to humanity of all time, (peace, life expectancy, comfort, education, ecology, etc.) is God given COAL. Take it away and if you were lucky enough to survive child birth you’d be trying to scratch out your subsistence in the middle of no where whipping a mule to plow your 5 acres of farmland, chopping down trees for heat and building material. IF you knew how to read you would have one book, the Bible, (handed down to you from 3 generations ago), and you would know every verse in it by heart by now. Your wife already gave birth three times but none of them lived past 6 months, your “retirement plan” is now in serious jeopardy and those Bible verses are about the only form of hope you have left.
Those who attack coal are those who want to de-industrialize the world in order to collapse civilization and have all of us including YOU to ~somehow~ return to to subsistence farming because they believe the world population is too large and that humans are some sort of planetary “disease”. Al Gore’s good friend Maurice Strong stated – “Isn’t the only hope for this planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
IMO, that one evil man, (he founded the UN environmental program which later launched the IPCC) is the fountainhead for this man made climate change scam. It’s a total ruse by progressive thugs like Maurice Strong and Al Gore who thirst for absolute power over the masses and, as repeated throughout history, the FIRST thing you have to do to take away freedom from the masses to gain control over them is to – LIE TO THEM.
And here you are lecturing to us about “obvious lies”….

The quid pro quo for Google climate BS is lack of action on tax policy change from the WH that would raise their single digit tax rate to anything higher. With that formula, every corporation in America could be turned into a climate BS mouthpiece and lined up and scheduled on when to release their press releases on queue.

As ususal, Driessen and Skate pose a series of disingenuous statements in a failed attempt to rebut Google’s position. They state:
“What we deny is the notion that humans can prevent these fluctuations, by ending fossil fuel use and emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide, which plays only an insignificant role in climate change.”
No climate scientist has suggested that ending FF use will prevent natural fluctuations. Instead, climate scientists have decisively shown that both FF use and natural fluctuations influence the global climate and that FF use will be the dominant driver of global temperatures over the next 100 years. I am sure all of the AGW skeptics on this site are smart enough to see through this simple deception, I am just surprised so many of you buy this and many other misstatements.
The good news is with more and more business leaders, politicians, and religious leaders on board, sites like this are becoming less and less relevant. Enjoy your shrinking echo chamber!

“No climate scientist has suggested that ending FF use will prevent natural fluctuations.”
But for some reason all of them have built models that pretended to be able to predict the future temperature trend, not mentioning that it’s all smoke and mirrors, and only after these models failed abysmally they reluctantly came out muttering “Natural Fluctuations”. Well Hindsight is 20:20; some fine prophets you are; FALSE prophets.
There’s not much left that your cult can do now except continuing to steal taxpayer money to heat up the globe by running more supercomputers. You will go out with a wimper, not with a bang, well basically it’s all been said, it’s over, follow the Alexa rating of realclimate into that long, dark night of irrelevance…
If you have a brain left, think about this – if natural fluctuations easily overwhelm your postulated, never observed positive water vapor feedback, then what becomes of your predictions of doom.

To successfully control a system the controller requires information about the outcomes of events given the actions that are taken in attempts at controlling them. This information is called the “mutual information.”
The mutual information is the product of a scientific theory. We have, as yet, no such theory in relation to the problem of controlling global surface temperatures. Thus, to attempt to control them as Mr. Schmidt wishes is folly.

David Socrates:
Thanks. I prefer “control” as we are the beneficiaries of a mathematical theory of control wherein the term is defined mathematically. if you’d like to use “influencing” as a synonym for “control” it’s fine with me.

Natural fluctuations rule ! Always have and always will despite some humans vain self dealing attempts to promote the AGW scam .
Notice how the promoters increasingly try to distance their role in the scam by vague references to ‘scientists tell us ” .
Expect deep discounts in 2015 on any global warming promoters book . The jig is up .

I pledge right here and now, I will keep my carbon footprint no larger than the top three Mr. Googles. I will even pledge to keep it smaller than Al Gore and Barrack Obama. Al Gore, the high priest of the Church Global Warming has been flying all over the world trying to warn us so today I make the pledge.

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